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THE STONES OF PARIS 

IN HISTORY AND LETTERS 



Moliere. 

(From the portrait by Mignard, in the Musee Conde, at Chantilly.) 



[Pro7n a carbon print by Brauft, Clement &= Co.'\ 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



IN HISTORY AND LETTERS 



BY 

BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN 



CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

MCMVI 









OCT 1 1906 



'.'^j. JW. » ■■ ■ ' < m ' m mK^KM. > »JM BB 



Copyright, 1899, 1906, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



TO 

W. C. BROWNELL 

IN CORDIAL TRIBUTE TO HIS 

"FRENCH TRAITS" 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Three Time-worn Staircases 11 

The Scholars' Quarter of the Middle Ages ... 73 

Moliere and his Friends 103 

From Voltaire to Beaumarchais 191 

The Paris of the Revolution ........ 221 

The Southern Bank in the Nineteenth Century. . 271 

The Paris of Honore de Balzac 321 

The Paris of Alexandre Dumas 359 

The Paris of Victor Hugo 393 

The Making of the Marais 433 

The Women of the Marais » . 483 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

From drawings by John Fulleylove, Esq. The portraits from 
photographs by Messrs. Braim, Clement et Cie. 

Moliere (from the portrait by Mignard in the Musee Conde, at 

Chantilly) Frontispiece" 

PAGE 

The so-called Hotel de la Reine Blanche (from a photograph of 

the Commission du Vieux Paris) . . ^ - - facing 28 ' 

Balcony of the Hotel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on He Saint-Louis . 47 
'' Jean-sans-Peur," Due de Bourgogne (from a painting by an 

unknown artist, at Chantilly) .... facing 56" 

The Tower of "Jean-sans-Peur" 7° 

The Church of Saint-Severin facing 74 - 

Rue Hautefeuille, a Survivor of the Scholars' Quarter . . 81 

The Interior of Saint- JuHen-le-Pauvre .... facing 82 ' 
Pierre de Ronsard (from a drawing by an unknown artist, in a 

private collection) facing 88* 

Balcony over the Entrance of the Cour du Dragon . . - 92 
Clement Marot (from the portrait by Porbus le Jeune, in a 

private collection) facing 94- 

Rene Descartes (from the portrait by Franz Hals, in the 

Musee du Louvre) facing 100- 

The Stage Door of Moliere's Second Theatre in Paris . .114 

The Stamp of the Comedie Frangaise 121 

The Moliere Fountain facing 128'" 

The Door of Corneille's Last Dwelling (from a drawing by 

Robert Delafontaine, by permission of M. Victorien 

Sardou) M^"^^ ^42 

Pierre Corneille (from the portrait by Charles Lebrun) facing 148 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

Rue Visconti. On the right is the Hotel de Ranes, and in the 

distance is No. 13 facing 160 

La Fontaine (from the portrait by Rigaud-y-Ros) . facing 176 

Boileau-Despreaux (from the portrait by Largilhere) facing 184" 
Voltaire (from the statue by Houdon in the foyer of the 

Comedie Frangaise) facing 192 

The Hotel-Lambert 198 

The Seventeenth-century Buildings on Quai Malaquais, with 

the Institute and the Statue of Voltaire . . facing 212 
Charlotte Corday (from the copy by Baudry of the only authen- 
tic portrait, painted in her prison) . . . facing 222- 

The Refectory of the Cordeliers facing 230. 

The Carre d'Atalante in the Tuileries Gardens . . . 236 

The Girlhood Home of Madame Roland . . . facing 244 

No. 13 Quai Conti 258 

Monogram from the former entrance of the Cour du Com- 
merce, believed to be the initials of the owner, one Girar- 
dot (from a drawing by Robert Delafontaine, by permis- 
sion of M. Victorien Sardou) 269 

Alphonse de Lamartine (from a sketch by David d' Angers, 

"un soir chez Hugo") facing 280 

Madame Recamier (from the portrait by Gros) . facing 310 

The Abbaye-aux-Bois 313 

Portal of Chateaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac . . .316 

The Court of the Pension Vauquer .... facing 324 

• Honore de Balzac (from the portrait by Louis Boulanger) facing 334 

Les Jardies 340 

The Antiquary's Shop, and in the back-ground the house where 

Voltaire died facing 348 

The Pension Vauquer 350 

The Commemorative Tablet to Balzac 354 

The Figure of d'Artagnan (from the Dumas Monument by 

Gustave Dore) facing 360 

Alexandre Dumas facing 374 

The Wall of the CarmeHtes 383 

Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hotel de Picardie . . facing 388 

The Hotel de Toulouse 398 

Alfred de Musset (from the sketch by Louis-Eugene hami) facing 414 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS si 



PAGE 

The Cemetery of Picpus 423 

Victor Hugo (from the portrait by Bonnat) . . jacing 430 

The Hotel du Prevot 445 

Anne de Bretagne (from a portrait by an unknown artist in a 

private collection) facing 456 " 

Louis XII (from a water-color portrait by an unknown artist, 

in a private collection) facing 460 

Sully (from a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musee 

Conde at Chantilly) . . . - - - - facing 464 

The Court of the Hotel de Bethune. Sully's Residence . . 466 
The Hotel de Mayenne. In the distance, the Temple Sainte- 

Marie, called the Church of the Visitation . . facing 468 

The Place des Vosges facing 485 

Madame de Sevigne (from the portrait by Mignard) . facing 488 

The Hotel de Beauvais facing 508 

The Staircase of the DwelHng of the Marquise de Brinvil- 

liers . . - - facing 516 

The Hotel de Sens facing 524 

Marguerite de Valois (from a portrait by an unknown artist, in 

the Musee de Montpellier) facing 528 

The Hotel Lamoignon facing 532 

The Tourelle of the Hotel Barbette 53^ 

The Gateway of the Hotel de Clisson 546 



INTRODUCTORY 

This book has been written for those who seek in 
Paris something more than a city of shows or a huge ba- 
zaar, something better than the cabaret wherein Fran- 
cois I. found entertainment, and yet not quite — still in 
Hugo's phrase — the library that Charles V. esteemed it. 
There are many lovers of this beautiful capital of a great 
people, who, knowing well her unconcealed attractions, 
would search out her records and traditions in stone, 
hidden and hard to find. This legitimate curiosity 
grows more eager with the increasing difficulties of 
gratifying it in that ancient Paris that is vanishing day 
by day ; and, in its bewilderment, it may be glad to find 
congenial guidance in these pages. In them, no attempt 
is made to destroy that which is new in order to recon- 
struct what was old. In telling the stories of those 
monuments of past ages that are visible and tangible, 
reference is made only to so much of their perished ap- 
proaches and neighbors as shall suffice for full realiza- 
tion of the significance of all that we are to see. This 
significance is given mainly by the former dwellers 
within these walls. We shall concern ourselves with 
the human document, illustrated by its surroundings. 
The student of history can find no more suggestive 
relics of mediaeval Paris than the still existing towers 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



and fragments of the wall of Philippe- Auguste, which 
shall be shown to him; for us, these stones must be 
made to speak, not so essentially of their mighty 
builder as of the common people, who moved about 
within that enclosure and gave it character. In like 
manner, the walls, which have sheltered soldiers, states- 
men, preachers, teachers, workers in art and letters, 
illustrious men and women of all sorts and conditions, 
will take on the personality of these impressive pres- 
ences. When we stand beneath the roof of that favorite 
personage in history, that spoiled child of romance, who 
happens to be dear to each one of us, we are brought 
into touch with him as with a living fellow-creature. 
The streets of Paris are alive with these sympathetic 
companions, who become abiding friends, as we stroll 
with them ; and allow none of the ache, confessed to be 
felt in such scenes, despite her reasoning, by Madame 
de Sevigne. Nor do they invite, here, any critical re- 
view of their work in life, but consent to scrutiny of 
their lineaments alone, and to an appreciation of their 
personal impress on their contemporaries and on us. 
So that essays on themes, historic, literary, artistic, can 
find no place in this record. Indeed, labor and time 
have been expended '' in hindering it from being . . . 
swollen out of shape by superfluous details, defaced 
with dilettanti antiquarianisms, nugatory tag-rags, and, 
in short, turned away from its real uses, instead of fur- 
thered toward them." In this sense, at least, the au- 
thors can say in Montaigne's words, "" ceci est un livre 
de bonne foy." 



INTRODUCTORY 



In this presentation of people and places it has been 
difficult, sometimes impossible, to keep due sequence 
both of chronology and topography. Just as Mr. Theo- 
dore Andrea Cook found in the various chateaux of his 
admirable " Old Touraine," so each spot we shall visit 
in Paris " has some particular event, some especial 
visitor, whose importance overshadows every other 
memory connected with the place." With that event or 
that visitor we must needs busy ourselves, without im- 
mediate regard to other dates or other personages. 
Again, to keep in sight some conspicuous figure, as he 
goes, we must leave on one side certain memorable 
scenes, to which we shall come back. Each plan has 
been pursued in turn, as has seemed desirable, for the 
sake of the clearness and accuracy, which have been 
considered above all else. The whole value of such 
records as are here presented depends on the pre- 
liminary researches. In the doing of this, thousands of 
books and pamphlets and articles have been read, hun- 
dreds of people have been questioned, scores of miles 
have been tramped. Oldest archives and maps have 
been consulted, newest newspaper clippings have not 
been disregarded. Nothing has been thought too 
heavy or too light that would help to give a charac- 
teristic line or a touch of native color. A third volume 
would be needed to enumerate the authorities called on 
and compared. Nor has any statement of any one of 
these authorities been accepted without ample investi- 
gation; and every assertion has been subjected to all 
the-proof that it was possible to procure. Those count- 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



less errors have been run to earth which have been 
started so often by the carelessness of an early writer, 
and ever since kept alive by lazy copiers and random 
compilers. These processes of sifting are necessarily 
omitted for lack of space, and the wrought-out results 
alone are shown. If the authors dare not hope that they 
have avoided errors on their own part, they may hope 
for indulgent correction of such as may have crept in, 
for all their vigilance. 

It is easier, to-day, to put one's hand on the Paris of 
the sixteenth century than on that of the eighteenth 
century. In those remoter days changes were slow to 
come, and those older stones have been left often un- 
touched. A curious instance of that aforetime leisureli- 
ness is seen in the working of the ordonnance issued 
on May 14, 1554, by Henri 11. forlhe clearing away of 
certain encroachments made on the streets by buildings 
and by business, notably on Rue de la Ferronerie ; that 
street being one of those used " for our way from our 
royal chateau of the Louvre to our chateau of the Tour- 
nelles." It was fifty-six years later, to the very day, that 
the stabbing of Henri IV. was made easy to Ravaillac, 
by the stoppage of the king's carriage in the blockade 
of that narrow street, its obstructions not yet swept out, 
in absolute disregard of the edict. From the death of 
the royal mason, Charles V., who gave a new face and 
a new figure to his Paris, to the coming of Henri IV., 
who had in him the makings of a kingly constructor, but 
who was hindered by the necessary destruction of his 
wars, there were two centuries of steady growth of the 



INTR OD UCTOR Y 



town outward, on all sides, with only slight alterations 
of its interior quarters. Many of these were trans- 
formed, many new quarters were created, by Louis 
XIII., thus realizing his father's frustrated plans. 
Richelieu was able to widen some streets, and Colbert 
tried to carry on the work, but Louis XIV. had no 
liking for his capital, and no money to waste for its 
bettering. His stage-subject's civic pride was unduly 
swollen, when he said : " A cette epoque, la grande 
ville du roi Henri netait pas ce qu'elle est aiijoiird'hui." 
At the beginning of the eighteenth century we find 
Paris divided into twenty quarters, in none of which 
was there any numbering of the houses. The streets 
then got their names from their mansions of the nobil- 
ity, from their vast monasteries and convents, from 
their special industries and shops. These latter names 
survive in our Paris as they survive in modern London. 
The high-swinging street lanterns, that came into use in 
1745, served for directions to the neighboring houses, as 
did the private lanterns hung outside the better dwell- 
ings. Toward the middle of that century the city alma- 
nacs began a casual numbering of the houses in their 
lists, and soon this was found to be such a convenience 
that the householders painted numbers on or beside their 
doors. Not before 1789 was there any organized or 
official numbering, and this was speedily brought to 
naught during the Revolution, either because it was too 
simple or because it was already established. To this 
day, the first symptom of a local or national upheaval, 
and the latest sign of its ending, are the ladder and 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



paint-pot in the streets of Paris. Names that recall to 
the popular eye recently discredited celebrities or hu- 
miliating events, are brushed out, and the newest 
favorites of the populace are painted in. 

The forty-eight sections into which the Revolution 
divided the city changed many street names, of course, 
and renumbered all the houses. Each lunatic section, 
quite sure of its sanity, made this new numbering of 
its own dwellings with a cheerful and aggressive dis- 
regard of the adjoining sections ; beginning arbitrarily 
at a point within its boundary, going straight along 
through its streets, and ending at the farthest house on 
the edge of its limits. So, a house might be No. 1187 
of its section, and its next-door neighbor might be No. 
I of the section alongside. In a street that ran through 
several sections there would be more than one house 
of the same number, each belonging to a different sec- 
tion. " Encore un Tableau de Paris " was published 
in 1800 by one Henrion, who complains that he passed 
three numbers 42 in Rue Saint-Denis before he came 
to the 42 that he wanted. The decree of February 7, 
1805, gave back to the streets many of their former 
names, and ordered the numbering, admirably uniform 
and intelligible, still in use — even numbers on one side 
of the street, odd numbers on the other side, both be- 
ginning at the eastern end of the streets that run paral- 
lel with the Seine, and at the river end of the streets 
going north and south. For the topographer all these 
changes have brought incoherence to the records, have 
paralyzed research, and crippled accuracy. In addition, 



INTR OD UCTOR V 



during the latter half of the nineteenth century, many 
old streets have been curtailed or lengthened, carried 
along into new streets, or entirely suppressed and built 
over. Indeed, it is substantially the nineteenth century 
that has given us the Paris that we best know ; begun 
by the great Emperor, it was continued by the crown 
on top of the cotton night-cap of Louis-Philippe, and 
admirably elaborated, albeit to the tune of the cynical 
fiddling of the Second Empire. The Republic of our 
day still wields the pick-axe, and demolition and re- 
construction have been going on ruthlessly. Such of 
these changes as are useful and guiltless are now in- 
telligently watched ; such of them as are needlessly 
destructive may be stopped in part by the admirable 
Commission du Vieux Paris. The members of this 
significant body, which was organized in December, 
1897, are picked men from the Municipal Council, 
from the official committees of Parisian Inscriptions, 
and of Historic Works, from private associations and 
private citizens, all earnest and enthusiastic for the 
preservation of their city's monuments that are mem- 
orable for architectural worth or historic suggestion. 
Where they are unable to save to the sight what is 
ancient and picturesque, they save to the memory by 
records, drawings, and photographs. The " Proces 
Verbal " of this Commission, issued monthly, contains 
its illustrated reports, discussions, and correspondence, 
and promises to become an historic document of in- 
estimable value. 

The words rue and place, as well as their attendant 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



names, have been retained in the French, as the only es- 
cape from the confusion of a double translation, first 
here, and then back to the original by the sight-seer. 
The definite article, that usually precedes these words, 
has been suppressed, in all cases, because it seems an 
awkward and needless reiteration. Nor are French 
men and French women disguised under translated 
titles. If Macaulay had been consistent in his mis- 
guided Briticism that turned Louis into Lewis, and had 
carried out that scheme to its logical end in every case, 
he would have given us a ludicrous nomenclature. 
" Bottin " is used in these pages as it is used in Paris, 
to designate the city directory : which was issued, first, 
in a tiny volume, in 1796, by the publisher Bottin, and 
has kept his name with its enormous growth through 
the century. 

The word hotel has here solely its original signifi- 
cance of a town house of the noble or the wealthy. In 
the sense of our modern usage of the word it had no 
place in old Paris. Already in the seventeenth century 
there were auberges for common wayfarers, and here 
and there an hotellerie for the traveller of better class. 
During the absences of the owners of grand city man- 
sions, their maitres-d' hotel were allowed to let them to 
accredited visitors to the capital, who brought their 
own retinue and demanded only shelter. When they 
came with no train, so that service had to be supplied, it 
was " charged in the bill," and that objectionable item, 
thus instituted, has been handed down to shock us in 
the hotel-garni of our time. With the emigration of 



INTRODUCTORY 



the nobility, their stewards and chefs lost place and 
pay, and found both once more in the public hotels they 
then started. No hotels-garnis can be found in Paris 
of earlier date than the Revolution, 

In their explorations into the libraries, bureaus, 
museums, and streets of Paris, the authors have met 
with countless kindnesses. The unlettered concierge 
who guards an historic house is proud of its traditions, 
or, if ignorant of them, as may chance, will listen to the 
tale with a courtesy that simulates sympathy. The ex- 
ceptions to this general amenity have been few and 
ludicrous, and mostly the outcome of exasperation 
caused by the ceaseless questioning of foreigners. The 
concierge of Chateaubriand's last home, in Rue du Bac, 
considers a flourish of the wet broom, with which he is 
washing his court, a fitting rejoinder to the inquiring 
visitor. That visitor will find Balzac's Passy residence 
as impossible of entrance now as it was to his creditors. 
The unique inner court of the Hotel de Beauvais must 
be seen from the outer vestibule, admission being re- 
fused by a surly concierge under orders from an un- 
generous owner. The urbanity of the noble tenant of 
the mansion built over the grave of Adrienne Lecouv- 
reur is unequal to the task of answering civil inquiries 
sent in stamped envelopes. All these are but shadows 
in the pervading sunshine of Parisian good-breeding. 
In making this acknowledgment to the many who must 
necessarily remain unnamed, the authors wish to record 
their recognition of the sympathetic counsel of Mile. 
Blanche Taylor, of Paris, and of George H. Birch, 



lo THE STONES OF PARIS 

Esq., Curator of the Soane Museum, London. Cordial 
thanks are especially given to the officials of the Hotel 
de Ville, in the bureau of the Conservation du Plan 
de Paris, to M. Charles Sellier of the Musee Carnavalet, 
to M. Monval, Librarian of the Comedie Franqaise, to 
M. G. Lenotre, and to M. Victorien Sardou, for un- 
measured aid of all sorts, prompted by a disinterested- 
ness that welcomes the importunate fellow-worker, and 
makes him forget that he is a stranger and a foreigner. 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 

We are to see a Paris unknown to the every-day 
dweller there, who is content to tread, in wearied idle- 
ness, his swarming yet empty boulevards ; a Paris un- 
seen by the hurried visitor, anxious to go his round of 
dutiful sight-seeing. This Paris is far away from the 
crowd, bustling in pursuit of pleasure, and hustling in 
pursuit of leisure ; out of sound of the teasing clatter 
of cab-wheels, and the tormenting toot of tram-horns, 
and the petulant snapping of whips ; out of sight of to- 
day's pretentious structures and pompous monuments. 
To find this Paris we must explore remote quarters, 
lose ourselves in untrodden streets, coast along the al- 
luring curves of the quays, cruise for sequestered isl- 
ands behind the multitudinous streams of traffic. We 
shall not push ahead just to get somewhere, nor rest- 
lessly " rush in to peer and praise." We shall learn 
to Haner, not without object, but with art and con- 
science ; to saunter, in the sense of that word, humor- 
ously derived by Thoreau from Sainte-Terre, and so 
transform ourselves into pilgrims to the spots sacred 
in history and legend, in art and literature. In a 
word, if you go with us, you are to become Sentimental 
Prowlers. 

13 



14 THE STONES OF PARIS 



In this guise, we shall not know the taste of Parisine, 
a delectable poison, more subtle than nicotine or strych- 
nine, in the belief of Nestor Roqueplan, that modern 
Voltaire of the boulevards. And we shall not share 
'' the unwholesome passion " for his Paris, to which 
Franqois Coppee owns himself a victim. Nor, on the 
other hand, shall we find " an insipid pleasure " in this 
adventure, as did Voltaire. Yet even he confesses, else- 
where, that one would " rather have details about Ra- 
cine and Despreaux, Bossuet and Descartes, than about 
the battle of Steinkerk. There is nothing left but the 
names of the men who led battalions and squadrons. 
There is no return to the human race for one hundred 
engagements, but the great men I have spoken of pre- 
pared pure and lasting pleasures for mortals still un- 
born." It is in this spirit that we start, sure of seeking 
an unworn sentiment, and of finding an undraggled 
delight, in the scenes which have inspired, and have 
been inspired by, famous men and women. Their days, 
their ways, they themselves as they moved and worked, 
are made alive for us once more by their surround- 
ings. Where these have been disturbed by improve- 
ments, '' more fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea," 
we get curious suggestions from some forgotten name 
cut in the stone of a street corner, from a chance-saved 
sign, a neglected tourelle, or a bit of battered carving. 
And where the modern despoiler has wreaked himself 
at his worst — as with the Paris of Marot, Rabelais, 
Palissy — we may rub the magic ring of the archaeolo- 
gist, which brings instant reconstruction. So that we 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 15 

shall seem to be walking in a vast gallery, where, in the 
words of Cicero, at each step we tread on a memory. 
*^ For, indeed," as it is well put by John Ruskin, " the 
greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, or in 
its gold. Its glory is in its age, and in that deep sense 
of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sym- 
pathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which 
we feel in walls that have long been washed by the 
passing waves of humanity." 

These stone and brick vestiges of the people of old 
Paris are to be sought in its byways, narrow and wind- 
ing; or hidden behind those broad boulevards, that 
have newly opened up its distant quarters, on the north 
or on the south. Sometimes these monuments have 
been brought into full view across the grassed or 
gravelled spaces of recent creation, so showing their 
complete and unmarred glory for the first time in all 
the ages. Thus we may now look on Notre-Dame and 
the Sainte-Chapelle, in dreamy surrender to their be- 
dimmed beauty, that persuades us that Paris can hold 
nothing in reserve more reverend in comely old age. 
Yet, almost within touch of these two, stands a gray 
tower, another sturdy survivor of the centuries. Be- 
tween the northern side of Notre-Dame and the river- 
bank, a happy chance has spared some few of the 
streets, though fewer of the structures, of this earliest 

A 

Paris of He de la Cite. This region recalls to us, by 
its street-names in part, and partly by its buildings, its 
former connection with the cathedral. In Rue des 
Chantres it lodged its choristers, and Rue du Cloitre- 



i6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Notre-Dame records the site of the clerical settlement, 
beloved by Boileau, wherein dwelt its higher officials. 
Rue Chanoinesse has its significance, too, and we will 
stop before the wide frontage of differing ages, whose 
two entrances, Nos. i8 and 20, open into the large 
courts of two mansions, now thrown into one. This 
interior court was a garden until of late years, and 
while grass and flowers are gone forever, it keeps its 
ancient well in the centre and its stone steps that 
mounted to the salons. Those salons, and the large 
court, and the smaller courts beyond — all these courts 
now roofed over with glass — are piled high with every 
known shape of household furniture and utensil in 
metal ; notably with the iron garden-chairs and tables, 
dear to the French. For this vast enclosure is the stor- 
age depot of a famous house-furnishing firm, and is one 
more instance of the many in Paris of a grand old man- 
sion and its dependencies given over to trade. 

By the courtesy of those in charge, we may pass with- 
in the spacious stone entrance arch of No. 18, and pick 
our way through the ordered confusion, past the ad- 
mirable inner facade of the main fabric, with its stately 
steps and portal and its windows above, topped by tiny 
hoods, to a distant corner ; where, in the gloom, we 
make out the base of a square tower and the foot of a 
corkscrew staircase. We mount it, spirally and slowly. 
The well-worn stone steps are narrow, and the turn of 
the spiral is sharp, for this tower was built when homes 
were fortresses, when space was precious, and when 
hundreds huddled within walls that will hardly hold 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 17 

one thriving establishment of our day. In this steep 
ascent, we get scant assistance from our hold on the 
rude hand-rail, roughly grooved in the great central 
column — one solid tree-trunk, embedded in the ground, 
stretching to the top of the stairs. Experts assure us 
that this tree was fully five hundred years old, when it 
was cut down to be made the shaft of this stairway, 
nearly five hundred years ago. For this stone tower is 
evidently of late fifteenth-century construction. The 
mediaeval towers were round, whether built upon their 
own foundations or rebuilt from Roman towers; and 
they gave way to square towers when battering-rams 
gave way to guns, in the fifteenth century. Yet this 
pile of masonry is known as " la tour de Dagobert/' and 
with no wish to discredit this legend, cherished by the 
dwellers in this quarter, we may quote Brantome con- 
cerning certain local traditions of the Tour de Nesle: 
'' Je ne puis dire si gela soit vrai, mais le vulgaire de 
Paris raiUrme." 

We can say, with certainty, that this tower was never 
seen by Dagobert, for, long before this tree had 
sprouted from the ground, he lived in the old Palace, 
the home of the early kings, at the other end of the 
island. There he flourished, for the ten years between 
628 and 638, in coarse splendor and coarser convivial- 
ity, his palace packed with barbaric gold and silver, 
with crude wall paintings and curious hangings. For 
this monarch made much of the arts of his day, when- 
ever he found leisure from his fighting and his drink- 
ing. Because of his love of luxury, a century of cyclo- 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



pocdias has " curved a contumelious lip " at his " cor- 
rupt court." On the other hand, he has been styled 
** Saint Dagobert " by writers unduly moved to emo- 
tion by his gifts to the churches at Saint-Denis, Rheims, 
Tours ; and by his friendship for certain bishops. But 
Rome, mindful of sundry other churches plundered 
and destroyed by him, has not assented to this saint- 
ship. We may accept his apt popular epithet, " le bon/' 
which meant, in those bellicose days, only merry or 
jovial ; an easy virtue not to be denied by priggish 
biographers to this genial ruffian. By turns, he de- 
voted himself to the flowing bowl in his palace there, 
and to building religious edifices all over the face of 
France. And he has accentuated the supremacy of 
the Church over all the warriors and the rulers of his 
day, in the soaring majesty of the two towers that 
dominate the buried outlines of his favorite church of 
Saint-Martin at Tours, solid and lasting in their isola- 
tion. There the man is brought almost into touch with 
us, while here only his name is recalled by this tower, 
which he never saw. 

The shadow-land of ancient French history, into 
which we have made this little journey, is not darker 
than this narrow staircase, as we creep dizzily upward, 
losing count of steps, stopping to take breath at the in- 
frequent windows, round-topped at first, then square 
and small. It is with surprise that we realize, stepping 
out on the tower-roof, that our standing-place is only 
five floors from the ground ; and yet from this modest 
height, overtopped by the ordinary apartment house of 



THREE TIME- WORN STAIRCASES 19 



Paris, we find an outlook that is unequalled even by that 
from Notre-Dame's towers. For, as we come out from 
the sheltering hood of our stair-way top, the great 
cathedral itself lies before us, like some beautiful living 
creature outstretched at rest. Words are impertinent 
in face of the tranquil strength of its bulk and the ex- 
quisite delicacy of its lines, and we find refuge in the 
affectionate phrase of Mr. Henry James, " The dear 
old thing!" 

Beyond the cathedral square, over the bronze Charle- 
magne on his bronze horse, glints the untravelled nar- 
rower arm of the Seine ; we turn our heads and look at 
its broader surface, all astir with little fidgetty bateaux- 
mouches and big, sedate barges. At both banks are 
anchored huge wash-houses and bathing establishments. 
From this island-centre all Paris spreads away to its 
low encircling slopes, to the brim of the shallow bowl 
in which it lies. In sharp contrast with all that new- 
ness, our old tower stands hemmed about by a medley 
of roofs of all shapes and all ages ; their red tiles of past 
style, here and there, agreeably mellowing the dull 
dominant blue of the Paris slate. On these roofs below 
jut out dormers, armed with odd wheels and chains for 
lifting odd burdens ; here on one side is an outer stair- 
case that starts in vague shadow, and ends nowhere, 
it would seem; far down glimmers the opaque gray 
of the glass-covered courts at our feet. A little to- 
ward the north — where was an entrance to this court, 
in old days, from a gateway on the river-bank — is the 
roof that sheltered Racine, along with the legal gen- 



20 THE STONES OF PARIS 

try of the Hotel des Ursins. And all about us, be- 
low, lies the little that is left of la Cite, the swept 
and set-in-order leavings of that ancient network of 
narrow streets, winding passages, blind alleys, all 
walled about by tall, scowling houses, leaning unwill- 
ingly against one another to save themselves from 
falling. This was the whole of Gallic Lutetia, the 
centre of Roman Lutetia, the heart of mediaeval Paris, 
the " Alsatia " of modern Paris ; surviving almost to 
our time, when the Second Empire let light and air into 
its pestilent corners. Every foot of this ground has its 
history. Down there, Villon, sneaking from the Uni- 
versity precincts, stole and starved and sang; there 
Quasimodo, climbing down from his tower, foraged 
for his scant supplies ; there Sue's impossibly dark vil- 
lany and equally impossible virtue found fitting stage- 
setting; there, Frangois, honest and engaging thief, 
slipped narrowly through the snares that encompassed 
even vagabonds, in the suspicious days and nights of 
the Terror. 

The nineteenth century, cutting its clean way through 
this sinister quarter, cutting away with impartial spade 
the round dozen churches and the hundreds of houses 
that made their parishes, all clustered close about the 
cathedral and the palace, has happily left untouched this 
gray tower, built when or for what no one knows. It is 
a part of all that it has seen, in its sightless way, through 
the changing centuries of steady growth and of tran- 
sient mutilation of its town. It has seen its own island 
and the lesser islands up-stream gradually alter their 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 21 

shapes ; this island of the city lengthening itself, by 
reaching out for the two low-shored grassy eyots down- 
stream, where now is Place Dauphine and where sits 
Henri IV. on his horse. The narrow channel between, 
that gave access to the water-gate of the old Palace, 
has been filled in, so making one island of the three, 
and Rue de Harlay-au-Palais covers the joining line. 

A 

So the two islands on the east — He Notre-Dame and 
He aux Vaches — have united their shores to make He 
Saint-Louis. The third island, most easterly of all — 
He des Javiaux of earliest times, known later as He 
Louvier — has been glued to the northern bank of the 
mainland, by the earthing-in of the thin arm of the 
river, along the line of present Boulevard Morland, 
and Quai Henri IV. And the two great islands as we 
know them — the permanent outcome of all these topo- 
graphical transformations — have been chained to each 
other and to both banks, by numerous beautiful bridges. 
Our tower raised its head in time to see the gradual 
wearing away of the mighty Roman aqueduct, that 
brought water to the Palais des Thermes of the Roman 
rulers — whose immense frigidarium is safe and sound 
within the enclosure of the Cluny Museum — from the 
Bievre, away off on the southern outskirts. This aque- 
duct started at the point where later was built the vil- 
lage of Arceuil — named from the mediaeval, or late, 
Latin Arculi — where was quarried the best stone that 
builded old Paris ; and curved with the valley of the 
Bievre like a huge railway viaduct, leaving that stream 
when it bent in its course to the Seine near the Sal- 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



petriere, and entering the town along the easterly line 
of Rue Saint- Jacques, and so straight away to the 
baths. This tower well remembers the new aqueduct, 
constructed massively on the ruins of the Roman, be- 
tween 1 613 and 1633, from Rungis, still farther south, 
to the Luxembourg Palace. Imperial and royal baths 
must have pure water, while wells and rivers must 
perforce content the townspeople. They had their 
aqueduct at last, however, laid, still along the top of 
these others, during the Second Empire. It is worth 
the little trip by rail to Arceuil to see the huge arches 
that climb along the valley carrying these piled-up 
conduits. 

Our old tower has seen the baby town creep, from 
its cradle on the shore, up that southern slope to where 
on its summit it found the tomb of its patron, Sainte 
Genevieve — one tower of her abbey still shows gray 
above the garden-walls of Lycee Henri IV. — and 
thence, its strength so grown as to burst its girdle 
of restraining wall, it strode far afield. Roman and 
Christian settlements, with all their greenery — palace, 
abbey, and school, each set within its spacious gar- 
dens — gradually gave place to these serried shining 
roofs we see, here and there pierced by church spires 
and punctuated by domes. And on the northern bank, 
our tower has seen the rising tide of the centuries 
swallow up the broad marshes along the shore and 
the wide woodlands behind; bearing down Roman 
villa and temple, Christian nunnery and monastery, 
washing away each successive breakwater of wall, un- 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 23 

til it surged over the crest of the encirding hills, now 
crowned by the imposing basilica of the Sacred Heart 
on Montmartre. 

It may have been here in time to look down on 
the stately procession escorting the little ten-year-old 
Henry VL, the new King of England, from the Palace 
to the cathedral; wherein was celebrated the service 
by which one English cardinal and two French bishops 
tried to consecrate him King of France. It saw, when 
the ceremony was ended, the turbulent mob of common 
French folk crowding about the boy-king and his Eng- 
lish escort as they returned, and ignominiously hustling 
them into the Palace. Not many years later, on April 
13, 1436, it possibly saw the French soldiery march 
into Place de Greve, over the bridge and through the 
streets behind, from their captured gate of Saint- 
Jacques; and not many days thereafter, the English 
soldiery hurrying along behind the northern wall from 
the Bastille to the Louvre, and there taking boat for 
their sail to Rouen; the while the Parisian populace, 
mad with joy on that wall, welcomed the incoming 
friend and cursed the outgoing foe. 

Our tower has watched, from its own excellent point 
of view, the three successive fires in and about the 
Palace, in 1618, 1736, and 1776. Between them, these 
fires carried away the constructions of Louis XII., the 
vast Salle des Pas-Perdus, the ancient donjon, the 
spires and turrets and steep roofs that swarmed about 
the Sainte-Chapelle, whose slender height seems to 
spring more airily from earth to sky by that clearance. 



24 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Only that chapel, the Salle-des-Gardes, the corner 
tower on the quay, the kitchens of Saint-Louis behind 
it, and the round-capped towers of the Conciergerie, 
are left of the original palace. The present outer cas- 
ing of this Tour de I'Horloge is a restoration of that 
existing in 1585, but the thirteenth-century fabric re- 
mains, and the foundations are far earlier, in the view 
of the late VioUet-le-Duc. Its clock dates from 1370, 
having been twice restored, and its bell has sounded, 
as far as our tower, the passing of many historic hours. 
It rang menacingly an hour later than that of Saint- 
Germain-l'Auxerrois, which had been advanced by 
the queen-mother's eagerness, on Saint Bartholomew's 
night. It was en carillon all of Friday, June 12, 1598, 
for the peace procured by Henri IV. between Spain 
and Savoy; and the birth of his son was saluted by 
its joyous chimes, at two o'clock of the afternoon of 
Friday, September 28, 1601. 

Nearly two years later — on Friday, June 20, 1603 — 
our tower stared in consternation, out over the end of 
the island, at the gallant Henry treading jauntily and 
safely across the uncompleted arches of the Pont-Neuf , 
from shore to shore. The nev^^ bridge was a wonder, 
and in attempts to climb along its skeleton, many over- 
curious citizens had tumbled into the river ; " but not 
one of them a king," laughed their king, after his suc- 
cessful stepping over. The bridge was built slowly, 
and was at last ready for traffic on February 6, 1607, 
and has stood so strong and stable ever since, that it 
has passed into a proverb as the common comparison 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 25 

for a Frenchman's robust health. It is the only bridge 
between the islands and either bank that has so stood, 
and this tower has seen each of the others wrecked by 
fire or flood. The tall wooden piles, on which the mediae- 
val bridgeways were built, slowly rotted, until they were 
carried away by the fierce current. And fire found its 
frequent quarry in the tall houses that lined either side 
of the roadway, shops on the lower floor, and tenants 
above. 

Thus our tower doubtless heard, on Friday, October 
25, 1499, the wrenching and groaning of the huge 
wooden piles of Pont Notre-Dame — its first pile driven 
down by temporarily sane Charles VI. — as they bent 
and broke and tumbled into the Seine, with their bur- 
den of roadway and of buildings ; whereby so thick a 
cloud of dust rose up from the water, that rescue of the 
inmates was almost impossible. Among the few saved, 
on that calamitous holiday of Saint-Crespin and Saint- 
Crespinien, was a baby found floating down-stream in 
its cradle, unwet and unharmed. So, too, Pont aux 
Meuniers and all its houses and mills fell in fragments 
into the stream on December 22, 1596. It was a 
wooden bridge, connecting the island end of Pont au 
Change diagonally with the shore of the mainland. 
It is reported that the dwellers on the bridge were 
rich men, many of them slayers and plunderers of 
the Huguenots on the festival of Saint Bartholomew. 
So it was said that the weak hand of city supervision, 
neglecting the bridge, was aided by the finger of God, 
pushing it down ! 



26 The stones of Paris 

The Petit-Pont dropped into the Seine no less than 
six times between the years 1206 and 1393. The earU- 
est Roman bridge, it had carried more traffic than any 
later bridge, and had been ruined and reconstructed 
time and again, until stone took the place of wood for 
its arches and road-way and houses. But the wooden 
scaffoldings used for the new construction were left be- 
low, and were the means of sacrificing it to an old 
woman's superstition. On April 2"], 1718, she launched 
a sehile — a wooden bowl — carrying a bit of blessed 
bread and a lighted taper, in the belief that this holy raft 
would stop over, and point out, the spot where lay the 
body of her drowned son. The taper failed in its 
sacred mission, and set fire to a barge loaded with hay, 
and this drifted against the timbers under the arches, 
and soon the entire bridge went up in flames. When 
again rebuilt, no houses were allowed upon it. With 
the falling of all those bridges and all that they held, 
the river-bed grew thick with every sort of object, com- 
mon and costly. Coins from many mints found their 
way there, not only through fire and flood, but because 
the money-changers, warily established on the bridges, 
dropped many an illicit piece from their convenient win- 
dows into the river, rather than let themselves be caught 
in passing counterfeits. This water museum has been 
dragged from time to time, and the treasures have gone 
to enrich various collections, notably that of M. Vic- 
torien Sardou. 

With all helpless Paris, our tower watched the old 
Hotel-Dieu — on the island's southern bank, where now 



THREE TiME-ivokisr Staircases 21 

is the green open space between Petit-Pont and Pont 
au Double — burning away for eleven days in 1772, and 
caught glimpses of the rescued patients, carried across 
Place du Parvis to hastily improvised wards in the 
nave of Notre-Dame. 

Unscathed by fire, unmutilated by man, unwearied 
by watching, " Dagobert's Tower " stands, penned in 
by the high old buildings that shoulder it all around. 
Hidden behind them, it is unseen and forgotten. The 
only glimpses to be got of its gray bulk are, one from 
the neighboring tower of the cathedral, and another 
from the deck of a river-boat as it glides under Pont 
d'Arcole ; a glimpse to be caught quickly, amid the 
quick-changing views of the ever-varied perspective of 
the island's towers and buttresses, pinnacles and domes. 

Far away from the island and its river, over the edge 
of the southern slope, behind the distant, dreary, outer 
boulevards, we find another ancient staircase. It is 
within the vast structure known as "" la maison dite de 
Saint Louis," commonly called the '' Hotel de la Reine 
Blanche," The modern boulevard, which gets its name 
from the astronomer, philosopher, and politician, Arago, 
has made a clean sweep through this historic quarter, 
but it has spared this mansion and the legend, which 
makes it the suburban dwelling of Blanche of Castile. 
Hereabout was all country then, and a favorite sum- 
mer resort of the wealthy citizens, whose modest cot- 
tages and showy villas clustered along the banks of the 
Bievre ; a free and wilful stream in the early years of 
the thirteenth century, often in revolt and sometimes 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



misleading the sedate Seine into escapades, to the dis- 
quiet of these faubourgs. From its gardens, portly 
meadows smiled townward to Mont-Sainte-Genevieve, 
crowded with its schools, and to the convent gardens, 
snuggling close under the shelter of the southern wall 
of Philippe-Auguste. 

To-day, all this quarter is made malodorous by its 
many tanneries and dye-works; they have enslaved the 
tiny Bievre and stained it to a dirty reddish brown ; so 
that it crawls, slimy and sluggish and ashamed, between 
their surly walls and beneath bedraggled bridges, glad 
to sink into the Seine, under the Orleans railway sta- 
tion. Its gardens and meadows are covered by square 
miles of stone, and the line of the old wall is hidden 
behind and under modern streets. And this so-called 
country home of Queen Blanche, become plain No. 17 
Rue des Gobelins, yet refuses, in its mediaeval dignity, 
to regard itself as a mere number in a street, and with- 
draws behind its wall, its shoulder aslant, to express its 
royal unconcern for the straight lines of city surveyors. 
These have not yet stolen all its old-time character from 
the remaining section of the street, nor spoiled such of 
its old-time facades as are left. This one at No. 19 de- 
mands our especial scrutiny, by its significant portal 
and windows, and by the belief that it was originally 
joined in its rear to No. 17, the two forming one im- 
mense structure of the same style of architecture. 
When was its date, who was its builder, what was its 
use, are undisclosed, so far, and we may follow our 
own fancies, as we enter through the narrow gateway 







The So-called Hotel de la Reine Blanche. 



(From a photograph of the Commission du Vieux Paris.) 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 29 

into the front court of " Queen Blanche's house." Its 
main fabric on the ground floor, with its low arched 
window, insists that it is contemporary with the clever 
woman and capable queen, to whom legend, wider 
than merely local, brings home this building. Yet 
its upper windows, and the dormers of the wing, and 
the slope of the roof, suggest a late fifteenth or an 
early sixteenth century origin ; and the cornice-mould- 
ing is so well worked out that it speaks plainly of a 
much later date than the mediaeval fortress-home. In 
a fourelle at either end is a grand spiral staircase, as in 
Dagobert's Tower, and, like that, these turn on huge 
central oak trunks. Here, however, the steps are less 
abrupt ; the grooving of the hand-rail, while it testifies 
to the stroke of the axe, is less rude ; and daylight is 
welcomed by wider windows. Each of the three floors, 
that lie between the two staircase turrets, is made up 
of one vast hall, with no traces of division walls. 
Whether or no a Gobelin once made usage of this build- 
ing, as has been claimed, it has now come into a tan- 
ner's service, and his workmen tread its stairs and 
halls, giving a living touch of our workaday world 
to these walls of dead feudalism. 

It was in 1200 that Blanche of Castile was brought to 
France, a girl of twelve, for her marriage with little 
Louis, of the same ripe age. His father, Philippe-Au- 
guste, was a mighty builder, and Paris flourished under 
him, her " second founder." In the intervals between 
crusades against infidels and wars with Christians, he 
founded colleges and gave other aid to the university on 



30 THE STONES OF PARIS 

this bank ; he pushed on with his strong hand the build- 
ing of Notre-Dame and of the old Hotel-Dieu on the 
island ; he removed his residence from the ancient 
Palace, there, to the Louvre on the northern bank, con- 
structed by him to that end — his huge foundation-walls, 
with some few capitals and mouldings, may be seen 
deep down in the substructures of the present Louvre 
— he shut in the unfenced cemetery of the Innocents 
from the merry-makers who profaned it ; he roofed and 
walled-in the open markets in the fields hard by that 
burial-ground ; and he paved the streets of the Cite, 
To meet this last outlay, he was lavish with the money 
of the citizens, notably of Gerard de Poissy, who was 
moved to donate one-half of his entire fortune by the 
sight of the King, " sparing neither pains nor expense 
in beautifying the town." Sparing himself no pains 
for the bettering of his beloved capital, Philippe-Au- 
guste spared no expense to its worthy burghers, and in 
their purses he found the funds for his great wall. This 
he planned and began, toward the close of the twelfth 
century, when at home for awhile from the warfaring, 
during which he had captured the '' saucy Chateau- 
Gaillard " of his former fellow-crusader, Richard the 
Lion-Hearted. 

Around the early Lutetia on the island, with the river 
for its moat, there had been a Gallo-Roman wall, well 
known to us all ; and there was a later wall, concern- 
ing which none of us know much. We may learn no 
more than that it was a work of Louis VL, " le Gros," 
early in the twelfth century, and that it enclosed the 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 31 

city's small suburbs on both banks of the mainland. 
Where this wall abutted on the two bridge-heads that 
gave access to the island, Louis VI. converted the 
wooden towers — already placed there for the protection 
of these approaches by Charles II., '' le Chauve," in the 
ninth century — into great gateways and small citadels, 
all of stone. They were massive, grim, sinister struct- 
ures, and when their service as fortresses was finished, 
they were used for prisons ; both equally infamous in 
cruelty and horror. The Petit Chatelet was a donjon 
tower, and guarded the southern approach to the island 
by way of the ancient main-road of the Gaul and the 
Roman, known later as the Voie du Midi, and later 
again as the Route d'Orleans, and now as Rue Saint- 
Jacques. This chatelet stood at the head of Petit- 
Pont, on the ground where Quais Saint-Michel and 
Montebello meet now, and was not demolished until 
late in the eighteenth century. The Grand Chatelet 
ended the northern wall where it met Pont au Change, 
and its gloomy walls, and conical towers flanking a 
frowning portal, were pick-axed away only in 1802. It 
had held no prisoners since Necker induced Louis XVI. 
to institute, in La Force and other jails, what were gro- 
tesquely entitled " model prisons." On the building that 
faces the northern side of Place du Chatelet you will 
find an elaborate tablet holding the plan of the dreary 
fortress and the appalling prison. When we stroll 
about the open space that its destruction has left, and 
that bears the bad old name, we need not lament its loss. 
Then came the wall of Philippe-Auguste, grandly 



32 THE STONES OF PARIS 



planned to enclose the closely knit island Cite and its 
straggling suburbs on either bank, with all their gar- 
dens, vineyards, and fields far out; and solidly con- 
structed, with nearly thirty feet of squared-stone height, 
and nearly ten feet of cemented rubble between the 
strong side faces. Its heavy parapet was battlemented, 
numerous round towers bulged from its outer side, the 
frequent gates had stern flanking towers, and the four 
ends on both river-banks were guarded by enormous 
towers, really small fortresses. The westernmost tower 
on this southern shore — with which section of the wall, 
built slowly from 1208 to 1220, we are now concerned — 
was the Tour de Nesle, and its site is shown by a 
tablet on the quay-front of the eastern wing of the 
Institute. Alongside was the important Porte de Nesle. 
Thence the wall went southwesterly, behind the line 
made by the present Rues Mazarine and Monsieur-le- 
Prince; then, by its great curve just north of Rue des 
Fosses-Saint- Jacques, it safeguarded the tomb and the 
abbey of Sainte Genevieve, and so bent sharply around 
toward the northeast, within the line of present Rues 
Thouin, du Cardinal-Lemoine, and des Fosses-Saint- 
Bernard, to the easternmost tower on Quai de la Tour- 
nelle, and its river-gate, Porte Saint-Bernard. That 
gate, standing until the end of the eighteenth century, 
had been titillated into a triumphal arch for Louis XIV., 
in whose time this quay was a swell promenade and 
drive. It still retains one of its grand mansions, the 
Hotel Clermont-Tonnerre, at No. 27 on the quay, with 
a well-preserved portal. 



THREE TIME- WORN STAIRCASES 33 



Of the stately sweep of this wall we may get sugges- 
tive glimpses by the various tablets, that show the sites 
of the tennis courts made later on its outer side, and 
that mark the places of the gates ; such as the tablet at 
No. 44 Rue Dauphine. The street and gate of that 
name date from 1607, when Henri IV. constructed them 
as the southern outlet from his Pont-Neuf, and named 
them in honor of the first dauphin born to France since 
Catherine de' Medici's puny sons. This Porte Dauphine 
took the place, and very nearly the site, of the original 
Porte de Buci, which stood over the western end of our 
Rue Saint- Andre-des-Arts, and was done away with in 
the cutting of Rue Dauphine. There was a gate, cut 
a few years after the completion of the wall, opening 
into the present triangular space made by the meeting 
of Rue de I'Ecole-de-Medecine and Boulevard Saint- 
Germain, and this gate bore this latter name. Of the 
original gates, that next beyond Porte de Buci was 
Porte Saint-Michel, a small postern that stood almost 
in the centre of the meeting-place of Boulevard Saint- 
Michel and Rues Monsieur-le-Prince and Soufflot. 
Next came the important Porte Saint- Jacques, mount- 
ing guard over the street now of that name, nearly 
where it crosses the southern side of new Rue Soufflot, 
named in honor of the architect of the Pantheon. On 
that southwest corner is a tablet with a plan of the gate. 
It was a gate well watched by friends within, and foes 
without, coming up by this easy road. Dunois gained 
it, more by seduction than force, and entered with his 
French troops, driving the English before him, on the 



34 THE STONES OF PARIS 

morning of Friday, April 13, 1436; and Henry of 
Navarre failed to gain it by force from the League, on 
the night of September 10, 1590. Stand in front of 
Nos. 174 and 176 of widened Rue Saint- Jacques, and 
you are on the spot where he tried to scale that gate, 
again and again. 

More than suggestions of the wall itself may be got 
by actual sight of sections that survive, despite the as- 
sertions of authorities that no stone is left. At the end 
of Impasse de Nevers, within a locked gate, you may see 
a presumable bit. In the court that lies behind Nos. 
2y and 29 Rue Guenegaud is a stable, and deep in the 
shadow of that stable lurks a round tower of Philippe- 
Auguste, massive and unmarred. At No. 4 Cour du 
Commerce a locksmith has his shop, and he hangs his 
keys and iron scraps on nails driven with difficulty be- 
tween the tightly fitted blocks of another round tower. 
Turn the corner into Cour de Rohan — a corruption of 
Rouen, whose archbishop had his town-house here — 
and you shall find a narrow iron stairway, that mounts 
the end of the sliced-off wall, and that carries you to a 
tiny garden, wherein small schoolgirls play on the very 
top of that wall. Down at the end of Cour de Rohan 
is an ancient well, dating from the day when this court 
lay within the grounds of the Hotel de Navarre, the 
property of Louis of Orleans before he became Louis 
XII. In style it was closely akin to the Hotel de Cluny, 
and it is a sorrow that it is lost to us. Its entrance was 
at the present Nos. 49 and 5 1 of Rue Saint- Andre-des- 
Arts, and the very ancient walls in the rear court of 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 35 

the latter house may have belonged to the Hotel de 
Navarre. When Louis sold this property, one por- 
tion was bought by Dr. Coictier, who had amassed 
wealth as the physician of Louis XL, and this well 
was long known by his name. It has lost its metal- 
work, which was as fine as that of the well once owned 
by Tristan I'Hermite, Coictier's crony, and now placed 
in the court of the Cluny Museum. 

Continuing along the course of the great wall, we 
find a longer section, whereon houses have been built, 
and another garden. At the end of the hallway of No. 
47 Rue Descartes is a narrow stairway, by which we 
mount to the row of cottages on top of the wall, and 
beyond them is a small domain containing trees and 
bushes and flower-beds, and all alive with fowls. Still 
farther, in a vacant lot in Rue Clovis, which has cut 
deep through the hill, a broken end of the wall hangs 
high above us on the crest, showing both solid faces and 
the rubble between. Its outer face forms the rear of 
the court at No. 62 Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Still 
another section can be seen in the inner court of No. 
9 Rue d'Arras, its great square stones serving as 
foundation for high houses. And this is the last we 
shall see of this southern half of the wall of Philippe- 
Auguste. 

When that monarch lay dying at Mantes, he found 
comfort in the thought that he was leaving his Paris 
safe in the competent hands of his daughter-in-law — 
whose beauty, sense, and spirit had won him early — 
rather than in the gentle hold of his son, misnamed '' le 



36 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Lion." He lived, as Louis VI 1 1., only three years, and 
*' la reine blanche " (the widowed queens of France 
wore white for mourning, until Anne of Brittany put 
on black for her first husband, Charles VIII.) became 
the sole protector of her twelve-year-old son, on whom 
she so doted as to be jealous of the wife she had her- 
self found for him. She ruled him and his hitherto 
unruly nobles, and cemented his kingdom, fractured 
by local jealousies. He is known to history as Saint 
Louis, fit to sit alongside Marcus Aurelius, in the 
equal conscience they put into their kingly duties. 
Voltaire himself ceases to sneer in the presence of this 
monarch's unselfish devotion to his people, and gives 
him praise as unstinted as any on record. 

His Paris, the Paris of his mother and his grand- 
father, was made up of la Cite on the island, under the 
jurisdiction of the bishop ; the northern suburb, outre- 
Grand-Pont or la Ville, governed by the Prevot des 
Marchands; the southern suburb, outre-Petif-Pont or 
I'Universite, appertaining to the '' Recteur '' ; all ruled 
by the Prevot of Paris, appointed by and accountable to 
the King alone. Hugo's '' little old lady between her 
two promising daughters " holds good to-day, when the 
daughters are strapping wenches, and have not yet got 
their growth. In all three sections, the priest and the 
soldier — twin foes of light and life in all times and in 
all lands — had their own way. They cumbered the 
ground with their fortresses and their monasteries, all 
bestowed within spacious enclosures ; so walling-in for 
their favored dwellers, and walling-out from the com- 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 37 

mon herd outside, the air and sun, green sights, and 
pleasant scents. There were no open spaces for the 
people of mediaeval days. Indeed, there were no '' peo- 
ple," in our meaning of that word. The stage direction, 
** Enter Populace," expresses their state. There were 
peasants in the fields, toilers in the towns, vassals, all 
of them — villains, legally — allowed to live by the sol- 
dier, that they might pay for his fighting, and serve as 
food for his steel ; sheep let graze by the priest, to be 
sheared for the Church and to be burned at the stake. 
This populace looked on at these burnings, at the cut- 
ting out of tongues and slicing off of ears and hacking 
away of hands by their lords, in dumb terror and docile 
submission. More than death or mutilation, did they 
dread the ban of the Church and the lash of its menac- 
ing bell. Their only diversion was made by royal pro- 
cessions, by church festivals, by public executions. So 
went on the dreary round of centuries, in a dull color- 
less terror, until it was time for the coming of the 
short, sharp Terror dyed red. Then the White Terror, 
that came with the Restoration, benumbed the land for 
awhile, and the tricolored eflfrontery of the Second 
Empire held it in grip. Against all royalist and im- 
perial reaction, the lesser revolutions of the nineteenth 
century have kept alive the essential spirit of the great 
Revolution of 1789, inherited by them, and handed 
down to the present Republic, that the assured ultimate 
issue may be fought out under its Tricolor. France, 
the splendid creature, once more almost throttled by 
priest and soldier, has saved herself by the courage of 



38 THE STONES OF PARIS 

a national conscience, such as has not been matched 
by any land in any crisis. 

They who by the grace of God and the stupidity of 
man owned and ordered these human cattle of the 
darkest ages, had their homes within this new, strong 
town-wall ; in fat monasteries, secluded behind garden 
and vineyard; in grim citadels, whose central keep 
and lesser towers and staircase turrets, stables and 
outer structures, were grouped about a great court, 
that swarmed with men-at-arms, grooms, and hangers- 
on. And so, endless walls scowled on the wayfarer 
through the town's lanes, narrow, winding, unpaved, 
filthy. On a hot summer day, Philippe- Auguste stood 
at his open window in the old Palace, and the odor of 
mud came offensively to the royal nostrils ; soon the 
main City streets were paved. When a king's son hap- 
pened to be unhorsed by a peripatetic pig nosing for 
garbage, a royal edict forbade the presence of swine 
in the streets ; the only exceptions being the precious 
dozen of the abbey of Petit-Saint-Antoine. There were 
no side-paths, and they who went afoot were pushed 
to the wall and splashed with mud, by the mules and 
palfreys of those who could ride. They rode, the man 
in front, his lady behind, en croupe. Open trenches, in 
the middle of the roadway, served for drainage, naked 
and shameless ; the graveyards were unf enced amid 
huddled hovels ; and the constant disease and frequent 
epidemics that came from all this foulness were fa- 
thered on a convenient Providence ! This solution of 
the illiterate and imbecile could not be accepted by the 



THREE TIME'WORN STAIRCASES 39 

shining lights of science, who showed that the plague of 
the middle of the sixteenth century came from malefi- 
cent comets, their tails toward the Orient, or from 
malign conjunctions of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. 
Ambroise Pare, the most enlightened man of his day, 
had the courage to suggest that there were human 
and natural causes at work, in addition to the divine 
will. And the common-sense Faculty of Medicine, 
toward the close of the sixteenth century, indicted 
the drains and cesspools as the principal origin of all 
maladies then prevalent. 

The only street-lighting was that given fitfully by the 
forlorn lanterns of the patrol, or by the torches of 
varlets escorting their masters, on foot or on horse. 
Now and then, a hole was burned in the mediaeval night 
by a cresset on a church tower or porch, or shot out 
from a cabaret's fire through an opened door. When 
tallow candles got cheaper, they were put into horn lan- 
terns, and swung, at wide intervals, high above the 
traffic. There, wind or rain put an untimely end to their 
infrequent flicker, or a " thief in the candle " guttered 
and killed it, or a thief in the street stoned it dead, for 
the snug plying of his trade. The town, none too safe in 
daylight, was not at all safe by night, and the darkness 
was long and dreary, and every honest man and woman 
went to bed early after the sunset angelus. Country 
roads were risky, too, and those who were unable to 
travel in force, or in the train of a noble, travelled not at 
all ; so that the common citizen passed his entire ex- 
istence within the confines of his compact parish. Nor 



40 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



could he see much of his Paris or of his Seine; he 
looked along the streets on stone walls on either side, 
and along the quays at timbered buildings on the banks. 
These rose sheer from the river-brink, and from both 
sides of every bridge, barring all outlook from the road- 
way between ; their gables gave on the river, and from 
their windows could be seen only a little square of 
water, enclosed between the buildings on both banks 
and on the neighboring bridge. So that the wistful 
burgher could get glimpses of his river only from the 
beach by the Hotel de Ville, or from the occasional ports 
crowded with boats discharging cargo. 

These cargoes were sold in shops on ground floors, 
and the tenants were thick on the upper floors, of dwell- 
ings mostly made of timber and plaster, their high- 
fronted gables looking on the street. This was the cus- 
tom in all towns in the Middle Ages, and it is a striking 
change that has, in our day, turned all buildings so 
that their former side has come to the front. The old 
Paris streets, in which shops and houses shouldered to- 
gether compactly, already dark and narrow enough, 
were further narrowed and darkened by projecting up- 
per floors, and by encroaching shop-signs, swinging, 
in all shapes and sizes, from over the doorways. Each 
shop sold its specialty, and the wares of all of them 
slopped over on the roadway. Their owners bawled 
the merits and prices of these wares in a way to shock 
a certain irritable Guillaume de Villeneuve, who com- 
plains in querulous verse, '* They do not cease to bray 
from morning until night." With all its growth in com- 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 41 

ing years, the city's squalor grew apace with its splen- 
dor, and when Voltaire's Candide came in, by way of 
Porte Saint-Marcel here on the southern side, in the 
time of Louis XV., he imagined himself in the dirtiest 
and ugliest of Westphalian villages. For all its filth and 
all its discomfort, this mediaeval Paris — portrayed, as 
it appeared three hundred years later, in the painful 
detail and inaccurate erudition of Hugo's '' Notre- 
Dame de Paris " — was a picturesque town, its build- 
ings giving those varied and unexpected groupings 
that make an architectural picture ; their roofs were 
tiled in many colors, their sky-lines were wanton in 
their irregularity, and were punctuated by pointed 
turrets and by cone-shaped tower-tops; and over 
beyond the tall town walls, broken by battlements and 
sentry-boxes, whirled a grotesque coronet of windmill 
sails. 

Turning from this attractive " Maison de la Reine 
Blanche^' from this quarter where her son Louis learned 
to ride and to tilt, and glancing behind at the famous 
tapestry works, the Gobelins, of whose founder and 
director we shall have a word to say later, we follow 
the avenue of that name to Rue du Fer-a-Moulin. This 
little street, named for a sign that swung there in the 
twelfth century, is most commonplace until it opens out 
into a small, shabby square, that holds a few discour- 
aged trees, and is faced by a stolid building whose 
wide, low-browed archway gives access to the court of 
the Boulangerie generale des Hopitaux et Hospices. 
This was the courtyard of the villa of Scipio Sardini, 



42 THE STONES OF PARIS 



whose name alone is kept alive by this Place Scipion — 
all that is left of his gardens and vineyards. Yet his 
was a notable name, in the days when this wily Tuscan 
was " ecuyer du Roi Henri 11./' and in those roaring 
days of swift fortunes for sharp Italian financiers, 
under the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici. This 
man amassed scandalous riches, and built his villa, men- 
tioned by Sauval as one of the richest of that time, here 
amid the country mansions that dotted this southern 
declivity. Of this villa only one wing still stands, and 
it is with unlooked-for delight that we find this admir- 
able specimen of sixteenth-century architecture, of a 
style distinct from that of any other specimen in Paris. 
The facade, that is left in the court of the Boulangerie, 
is made up of an arcade of six semi-circular arches on 
heavy stone pillars, a story above of plum-colored brick 
cut into panels by gray stone, its square-headed win- 
dows encased with the same squared stone, and an 
attic holding two dormers with pointed hoods. Set in 
the broad band between the two lower floors, were six 
medallions, one over the centre of each arch ; of these 
six, only four remain. These contain the heads of war- 
riors and of women, boldly or delicately carved, and 
wonderfully preserved ; yet time has eaten away the 
terra-cotta, wind and wet have dulled the enamel that 
brightened them. The buildings about this court and 
behind this unique fa(;ade are commonplace and need 
not detain us. It was in 1614 that the General Hospital 
took the villa and enlarged it; in 1636, to escape the 
plague, the prisoners of the Conciergerie were installed 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 43 

here ; and it has served as the bakery for the civil hos- 
pitals of Paris for many years. 

We go our way toward our third staircase, not by the 
stupidly straight line of Rue Monge, but by vagrant 
curves that bring us to the prison of Sainte-Pelagie, 
soon to disappear, and to the Roman amphitheatre just 
below, happily rescued forever. Here, in Rue Car- 
dinal-Lemoine, we slip under the stupid frontage of 
No. 49 to the court within, where we are faced by the 
hotel of Charles Lebrun. We mount the stone steps 
that lead up to a wide hall, and so go through to a far- 
ther court, now unfortunately roofed over. This court 
was his garden, and this is the stately garden-front that 
was the true f agade, rather than that toward the street ; 
for this noble mansion — the work of the architect Ger- 
main Boffrand, pupil and friend of Hardouin Mansart 
— was built after the fashion of that time, which shut 
out, by high walls, all that was within from sight of 
the man in the street, and kept the best for those who 
had entry to the stiff, formal gardens of that day. 

Pupil of Poussin, protege of Fouquet, friend of Col- 
bert, Lebrun was the favorite court painter and decora- 
tor, and the most characteristic exponent of the art of 
his day ; his sumptuous style suiting equally Francois 
I.'s Fontainebleau, and Louis XIV.'s Versailles. He 
aided Colbert in the founding of the Royal Academy of 
Painting and Sculpture, and in the purchase by the 
State of the Gobelins. This factory took its name from 
the famous dyer who came from Rheims, and tinted the 
clear Bievre with his splendid scarlet, says Rabelais; 



44 THE STONES OF PARIS 

SO that it took the name of la Riviere des Gobelins, of 
which Ronsard sings. The statesman and the artist 
in concert buiU up the great factory of tapestries and 
,of furniture, such as were suitable for royal use. Made 
Director of the Gobelins and Chancellor of the Acad- 
emy, and making himself the approved painter of the 
time to his fellow-painters and to the buying public, 
Lebrun's fortune grew to the possession of this costly 
estate, which extended far away beyond modern Rue 
Monge. The death of Colbert — whose superb tomb in 
Saint-Eustache is the work of his surviving friend — 
left him to the hatred of Louvois, who pushed Mignard, 
Moliere's friend, into preferment. And Lebrun, genu- 
ine and honest artist, died of sheer despondency, in his 
official apartment on the first floor of the factory, facing 
the chapel. His rooms have been cut up and given over 
to various usages, and no trace can be found in the 
Gobelins of its first director. 

His body rests in his parish church, a few steps 
farther on, through ancient Rue Saint- Victor, now 
curtailed and mutilated. Along its line, before we 
come to the square tower of Saint-Nicolas-du-Char- 
donnet, we skirt the dirty yellow and drab wall of the 
famous seminary alongside the church, and bearing its 
name. Its entrance is at No. 30 Rue de Pontoise, and 
among the many famous pupils who have gone in and 
out since Calvin was a student here, we may mention 
only Ernest Renan. In 1838, the director of the school 
being the accomplished Dupanloup, this boy of fifteen 
came fresh from Brittany to his studies here. We shall 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 45 

follow him to his later and larger schools, in other pages. 
When Jean '' le Moine," the son of a Picardy peasant, 
came to sit in a cardinal's chair, and was sent to Paris 
as legate by Pope Boniface VIII. , he established a great 
college in the year 1303. For it he bought the chapel, 
the dwellings, and the cemetery of the Augustins that 
were all in fields of thistles. So came the name " du 
Chardonnet " to the church now built on the ruins of 
Lemoine's chapel, in the later years of the seventeenth 
century. Lebrun decorated one of its chapels for the 
burial of his mother, and his own tomb is there near 
hers. Some of his work still shows on the ceiling; 
and in an adjacent chapel, in odd proximity, once hung 
a canvas from the brush of Mignard. In striking con- 
trast, the busts of the two men face each other in the 
Louvre; that of Mignard is alert with intelligence in 
face and poise of head, while Lebrun's suggests a some- 
what slow-witted earnestness. 

From this short stay in the realm of Louis the Un- 
real, we go to the island that bears the name of the 
Louis who was called a saint, but who was a very real 
man. All the streets along here that take us to the 
river, as far easterly as the one that bears the name of 
Cardinal Lemoine, were cut through the grounds of his 
college and of the Bernardins, an ancient foundation 
alongside. Of the buildings of this vast monastery, the 
refectory remains, behind the wall on the western side 
of Rue de Poissy. This characteristic specimen of 
thirteenth-century architecture, but little spoiled by 
modern additions, is used for the caserne of the Sa- 



46 THE STONES OF PARIS 

peurs-Pompiers. Here, at the foot of the street on the 
river-bank on our right, is the great space where Boule- 
vard Saint-Germain comes down to the quay, and where 
the old wall came down to its great tower on the shore. 
On our left, as we cross broad Pont de la Tournelle, we 
get an impressive view of Notre-Dame. And now we 
find ourselves in a provincial town, seemingly far re- 
moved from our Paris in miles and in years, by its iso- 
lation and tranquillity and old-world atmosphere. Its 
long, lazy main street is named after the royal saint, 
and its quays keep the titles of royal princes, Bourbon, 
Orleans, Anjou. A great royal minister, Maximilien 
de Bethune, gives his name to another quay, and his 
great master gives his to the new boulevard crossing it. 
Henry often crossed his faithful Sully, but they were at 
one in the orders issued, in the year before the King's 
murder, for the sweeping away of the woodyards, that 
made this island the storehouse of the town's timber, 
and for the construction of these streets and buildings. 
The works planned by Henri IV. were carried out by 
Marie de' Medici and Louis XIII. A concession was 
given for the laying out of streets and for the buildings 
on this island, and for the construction of a new stone 
bridge to the Marais, to the three associates, Marie, Le 
Regrettier, Poultier, who gave their names to the bridge 
and to two of the streets. There was already a small 
chapel in the centre, the scene of the first preaching of 
the First Crusade, and this chapel has been enlarged 
to the present old-time parish church. Just within its 
entrance is the henitier, filled with water from the 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 



47 



mouth of a marble cherub who wears a pretty marble 
*' bang." It came from the Carmelites of Chaillot, in 
souvenir of " Sister Louise." 

The sites on the island's banks, newly opened in the 
early years of Louis XIIL's reign, were in demand at 
once for the mansions of the wealthy, and a precocious 
city started up. Corneille's Menteiir, new to Paris and 
the island, rhapsodizes in one of his captivating flights, 
this time without lying : 

"yy croyais ce jnatin voir tcne tie enchanth, 
Je la laissai' deserte et la trouve habitee j 
Quelque Ainphion nouveau, sans Vaide des magons. 
En SMperbes palais a change ses buissonsy 

We shall come hither again, in company with Vol- 
taire to one of these palaces, with Balzac to another. 
In these high old houses in these old streets dwelt old 
families, served by old retain- 
ers devoted to their mistresses, 
who hugged their firesides like 
contented tabby-cats. They 
had no welcome for intruders 
into their ''Ville-Saint-Louis" 
from the swell quarters on the 
other side of the river, and it 
used to be said that "V habitant 
du Marais est Stranger dans 
Viler 

Pont Louis - Philippe — an 
absurdly modern issue from 




Balcony of the Hotel de Lau- 
zun-Pimodan, on lie Saint- 
Louis. 



48 THE STONES OF PARIS 

this ancient quarter — carries us to the quay of the 
Hotel de Ville, and we may turn to look in at Saint- 
Gervais, its precious window as brilliant as on the day 
it was finished by Jean Cousin. Passing in front of 
the imperious statue of Etienne Marcel, staring at the 
river that was his grave, we cross Place de I'Hotel-de- 
Ville, once Place de Greve, when it had in the centre 
its stone cross reached by high steps, and its busy gal- 
lows close at hand. We forget its horrid memories in 
the sight of the new Hotel de Ville, of no memories, 
good or bad, to dash our delight in this most nearly 
perfect of modern structures ; perfect in design, exe- 
cution, and material, a consummate scheme carried out 
to the last exquisite detail by architects, sculptors, and 
decorators, all masters of their crafts. 

Our direct road takes us through the Halles, their 
huge iron and glass structures the lineal descendants 
of those heavy stone Halles, started in the twelfth 
century here in the fields, when the small market on the 
island no longer sufficed. Their square, dumpy pillars, 
and those on which the houses all about were once sup- 
ported, survive only in the few left from the seven- 
teenth-century rebuilding, now on the north side of Rue 
de la Ferronerie. Standing in that arcade, we look out 
on the spot where Ravaillac waited for the coming of 
Henri IV. The wretched fanatic, worked on by whom 
we shall never know, had found Paris crowded for the 
Queen's coronation, and had hunted up a room in the 
" Three Pigeons," an inn of Rue Saint-Honore, op- 
posite the Church of Saint-Roch. Here or in another 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 49 



tavern, while prowling, he stole the knife. The narrow 
street was widened a Httle by Richeheu, and few of its 
ancient buildings are left. Returning through this 
arcade, once the entrance to the Cemetery of the Inno- 
cents, to Rue des Innocents just behind, you will find 
many of the old charniers absolutely unchanged. They 
form the low-ceilinged ground floor of nearly all these 
buildings between Rue Saint-Denis and Rue de la Lin- 
gerie. Perhaps the most characteristic specimen is 
that one used for a remise de voitures a bras, a phrase 
of the finest French for a push-cart shed ! And under 
No. 15 of this street of the Innocents, you may explore 
two of the cemetery vaults in perfect preservation. 
They are come to less lugubrious usage now, and serve 
as a club-room for the teamsters who bring supplies to 
the markets over-night, and for the market attendants 
who wait for them. Their wagons unloaded, here 
they pass the night until daylight shall bring customers, 
drinking and singing after their harmless fashion, hap- 
pily ignorant or careless of the once grisly service of 
these caves. The attendants in the cabaret on the en- 
trance floor, tired as they are by day, will courteously 
show the cellars, one beneath the other. One must 
stoop to pass under the heavily vaulted low arches, and 
the small chambers are overcrowded with a cottage 
piano and with rough benches and tables ; these latter 
cut, beyond even the unhallowed industry of schoolboys, 
with initials and names of the frequenters of the club, 
who have scarred the walls in the same vigorous style. 
The demure dame du comptoir above assures you that 



50 THE STONES OF PARIS 

you will be welcomed between midnight and dawn, but 
bids you bring no prejudices along, for the guests are 
not apt, in their song and chatter, to "' chercher la 
delicatesse " I 

The Church of the Innocents, built by Louis " le 
Gros " early in the twelfth century, had on its corner at 
Rues Saint-Denis and aux Fers — this latter now wi- 
dened into Rue Berger — a most ancient fountain, dat- 
ing from 1273. This fountain was built anew in 1550, 
from a design of the Abbe de Clagny, not of Pierre 
Lescot as is claimed, and was decorated by Jean Goujon. 
Just before the Revolution (1785-88), when church and 
charnel-houses and cemetery were swept away, this 
fountain was removed to the centre of the markets — the 
centre, too, of the old cemetery — and has been placed, 
since then, in the middle of this dainty little square 
which greets us as we emerge from our cabaret. To the 
three arches it owned, when backed by the church cor- 
ner, a fourth has been added to make a square, and the 
original Naiads of Goujon have been increased in num- 
ber. Their fine flowing lines lift up and lend distinc- 
tion to this best bit of Renaissance remaining in Paris. 
And here we are struck by the ingenuity shown by 
making the water in motion a signal feature of the 
decoration — another instance of this engaging charac- 
teristic of French fountains. 

A few steps farther north take us to Rue Etienne 
Marcel, cutting its ruthless course through all that 
should be sacred, in a fashion that would gladden the 
sturdy provost. For all its destructive instincts, it yet 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 51 

has Spared to us this memorable bit of petrified history, 
the tower of '' Jean-sans-Peur." At No. 20, on the 
northern side of this broad and noisy street, amid mod- 
ern structures, its base below the level of the pavement, 
stands the last remaining fragment of the Hotel de 
Bourgogne ; which, under its earlier name in older an- 
nals as the Hotel d'Artois, carries us back again to the 
thirteenth century, for this was the palace-fortress built 
by the younger brother of Saint Louis, Robert, Count 
of Artois. He it was who fell, in his '' senseless ardor," 
on the disastrous field of Massouah, in 1250; when 
the pious King and his devoted captains were made 
captive by the Sultan of Egypt, and released with 
heavy fines, so ending that Sixth Crusade. 

The Hotel d'Artois was a princely domain, reaching 
southward from the wall of Philippe-Auguste to Rue 
Mauconseil, a road much longer then, and extending 
from present Rue Saint-Denis to Rue Montorgueil, the 
two streets that bounded the property east and west. 
Some of its structures backed against the wall, some of 
them rested upon its broken top. For the grounds and 
gardens enclosed within this northern enceinte — com- 
pleted between 11 90 and 1208 — stretched to its base, 
leaving no room for a road on its inner side. Because 
of this plan, and because this wall crumbled gradually, 
its broken sections being surrounded and surmounted 
by crowding houses, no broad boulevards were laid out 
over its line — as was done with its immediate succes- 
sor, the wall of Charles V. — and it is not easy to trace 
it through modern streets and under modern structures. 



52 THE STONES OF PARIS 

The only fragment left is the tower in the court of the 
Mont-de-Piete, entered from Rue des Francs-Bour- 
geois, and it is of build less solid than those we have 
seen on the southern bank. In the pavement of the first 
court is traced the line of the wall up to this tower. 
With this exception, we can indicate only the sites of 
the towers and the course of the wall. 

The huge Tour Barbeau was at the easternmost 
river end, on Quai des Celestins, nearly at the foot of 
our Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. It commanded Port 
Saint-Paul, chief landing-place of river boatmen, and 
guarded the Poterne des Barres. That name was also 
given to the small street — now Rue de I'Ave Maria — 
that led from this postern-gate. They owe that name 
indirectly to Saint Louis. Returning from the Holy 
Land, he had brought six monks from Mount Carmel, 
and housed them on the quay, called now after their 
successors, the Celestins. The black robes, striped 
white, of these six monks, made them known popularly 
as *' les Barres." Our wall ran straight away from 
this waterside gate, parallel with and a little to the west 
of present Rue des Jardins, then a country road on its 
outer edge, to Porte Baudoyer, afterward Porte Saint- 
Antoine, standing across the space where meet Rues 
Saint-Antoine and de Rivoli. This was the strongest 
for defence of all the gates, holding the entrance to 
the town, by way of the Roman and later the Royal 
road from the eastern provinces. From this point the 
wall took a great curve beyond the bounds of the 
built-up portions of the town. The Poterne Barbette, 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 53 

its next gate, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, just south of 
its crossing by Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, lost its old 
name in this name taken from the Hotel Barbette, 
built a century later, outside the wall here. Next 
came the gate in Rue du Temple, nearly half way be- 
tween our Rues de Braque and Rambuteau. Through 
this gate passed the Knights Templar to and from 
their great fortified domain beyond. The Poterne 
Beaubourg, in the street of that name, was a minor 
gateway, having no especial history beyond that con- 
tained in the derivation of its name, '' heauhoiirg," 
from a particularly rich settlement, just hereabout. 
Next we come to two most important gates, Saint- 
Martin and Saint-Denis, across those two streets, that 
guarded the approaches by the great roads from Sen- 
lis and Soissons, and the heart of the land, old lie 
de France, and from all the northern provinces. Be- 
tween the Saint-Denis gate and that at Rue Montor- 
gueil, lay the property of the Comte d'Artois, and he 
cut, for his royal convenience, a postern in the wall that 
formed his northern boundary. 

From this point our wall went in another wide curve 
to the river-bank, within the lines of old Rues Platriere 
and Crenelle, the two now widened into modern Rue 
Jean- Jacques-Rousseau. The country road that is now 
Rue Montmartre was guarded by a gate, opened a 
few years after the completion of the wall, and its site 
shown by a tablet in the wall of No. 30 of that street. 
A small gate was cut at the meeting of present Rues 
Coquilliere and Jean- Jacques-Rousseau. Nearly op- 



54 THE STONES OF PARIS 

posite the end of this latter street, where Rue Saint- 
Honore passes in front of the Oratoire, was the last 
public gate on the mainland. Thence the course was 
straight away to the river shore, as you may see by 
the diagram set in lighter stone in the pavement of 
the court of the Louvre. These stones mark also the 
huge round of the donjon of the old Louvre, on whose 
eastern or town side the wall passed to the river-side 
Tour-qui-fait-le-Coin. This tower was of the shape 
and size of the opposite Tour de Nesle, which we have 
already seen at the point where the southern wall came 
down to the shore ; and between the two towers, a 
great chain was slung across the Seine to prevent ap- 
proach by river pirates. Pont des Arts is almost di- 
rectly over the dip of that chain. So, too, the river 
was protected at the eastern ends of the wall ; the 

A 

Barbeau tower was linked to the solitary tower on He 
Notre-Dame, and that again across the other arm of 
the Seine, to the immense tower on Quai de la Tour- 
nelle. This island Tour Loriaux rose from the banks 
of a natural moat made by the river's narrow channel 

A ^ 

between He Notre-Dame and He aux Vaches, and this 
bank was afterward further protected by a slight cur- 
tain of wall across the island, with a tower at either 
end. Four centuries later, when this island wall and 
its towers had long since crumbled away, that moat 
was filled up — Rue Poulletier, the modernized Poul- 
tier, lies over its course — and the two small islands 
became large He Saint-Louis. 

And now, we have seen la Cite, la Ville, rUniversite, 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 55 

all girdled about by Philippe-Auguste's great wall. 
The City could spread no farther than its river-banks ; 
the University was content, to abide within its bounds, 
even as late as the wars of the League; the Town 
began speedily to outgrow its limits, and within two 
centuries it had so developed that the capacious range 
of a new wall, that of Charles V., was needed to en- 
close its bustling quarters. That story shall come in 
a later chapter. 

One hundred years after the death of Robert of Ar- 
tois, his estate passed, by marriage, to the first house 
of Burgundy, whose name it took, and when that 
house became extinct, in the days of Jean "" le Bon," 
second Valois King of France, it came, along with the 
broad acres and opulent towns of that duchy, into his 
hands, by way of some distant kinship. This generous 
and not over-shrewd monarch did not care to retain 
these much-needed revenues, and gave them, with the 
resuscitated title of Burgundy, to his younger son, 
" recalling again to memory the excellent and praise- 
worthy services of our right dearly beloved son Philip, 
the fourth of our sons, who freely exposed himself to 
death with us, and, all wounded as he was, remained 
unwavering and fearless at the battle of Poictiers." 
From that field Philip carried away his future title, '' le 
Hardi." By this act of grateful recognition, rare in 
kings, were laid the foundations of a house that was 
to grow as great as the throne itself, to perplex France 
within, and to bring trouble from without, throughout 
long calamitous years. This first Duke Philip seems 



56 THE STONES OF PARIS 

to have had the hardihood to do right in those wrong- 
doing days, for he remained a sufficiently loyal subject 
of his brother Charles V., and later a faithful guardian, 
as one of the " Sires de la Fleitr-de-Lis," of his nephew, 
the eleven-year-old Charles VI. He married Mar- 
garet, heiress of the Count of Flanders, and widow of 
PhiHppe de Rouvre, last of the old line of Burgundy, 
and she brought, to this new house of Burgundy, the 
fat, flat meadows and the turbulent towns of the Low- 
lands, and also the Hotel de Flandre in the capital, 
where now stands the General Post-office in Rue Jean- 
Jacques-Rousseau. 

Duke Philip, dying in 1404, bequeathed to his eldest 
son, John, nick-named " Jean-sans-Peur," not only a 
goodly share of his immense possessions, but also the 
pickings of a " very pretty quarrel " with Louis de 
Valois, Due d'Orleans. This quarrel was tenderly 
nursed by John, who, as the head of a powerful inde- 
pendent house, and the leader of a redoubtable fac- 
tion, felt himself to be more important than the royal 
younger brother. Ambitious and unscrupulous, cal- 
culating and impetuous, he created the role on his 
stage, played with transient success by Philippe-Egal- 
ite, four hundred years later. He rode at the head 
of a brilliant train and posed for the applause of the 
populace. He walked arm in arm with the public exe- 
cutioner, Capeluche, and when done with him, handed 
him over to the gallows. Finding himself grown so 
great, he schemed for sole control of the State. The 
one man in his way was Louis of Orleans, the mad 




" Jean-sans-Peur," Due de Bourgogne. 

(From a painting by an unknown artist, at Chantilly.) 



[ From a carbon print by Brau7t, Clement &" Co.] 






< 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 57 

king's only brother, the lover of the queen, and her 
accompHce in plundering and wasting the country's 
revenues. He was handsome and elegant, open in 
speech and open of hand, bewitching all men and 
women whom he cared to win. " Qui veiilt, pent," was 
his braggart device, loud on the walls of the rooms 
of Viollet-le-Duc's reconstructed Pierrefonds, whose 
original was built by Louis. In its court you may see 
the man himself in Fremiet's superb bronze, erect and 
alert on his horse. The horse's hoofs trample the 
flowers, as his rider trod down all sweet decencies in 
his stride through life. He was an insolent profligate, 
quick to tell when he had kissed. In his long gallery 
of portraits of the women who, his swagger suggested, 
had yielded to his allurements, he hung, with unseemly 
taste, those of his lovely Italian wife, Valentine Vis- 
conti, and of the Duchess of Burgundy, his cousin's 
wife; both of them honest women. For this boast, 
John hated him ; he hated him, as did his other unlet- 
tered compeers, for his learning and eloquence and 
patronage of poetry and the arts ; he hated him as did 
the common people, who prayed " Jesus Christ in 
Heaven, send Thou someone to deliver us from Or- 
leans." 

At last *' Jean-sans-Peur " mustered his courage and 
his assassins to deliver himself and France. Isabelle 
of Bavaria had left her crazed husband in desolate 
Hotel Saint-Paul, and carried her unclean court to 
Hotel Barbette — we shall see more of these residences 
in another chapter — where she sat at supper, with her 



58 The stones of paris 

husband's brother, on the night of November 23, 1407. 
It was eight in the evening, dark for the short days 
of that " black vi^inter," the bitterest known in France 
for centuries. An urgent messenger, shown in to Or- 
leans at table, begged him to hasten to the King at 
Saint-Paul. The duke sauntered out, humming an 
air, mounted his mule and started on his way, still 
musical ; four varlets with torches ahead, two 'squires 
behind. Only a few steps on, as he passed the shad- 
owed entrance of a court, armed men — many more 
than his escort — sprang upon him and cut him down 
with axes. He called out that he was the Duke of 
Orleans. '' So much the better ! " they shouted, and 
battered him to death on the ground; then they rode 
oif through the night, unmolested by the terrified at- 
tendants. The master and paymaster of the gang, who 
was watching, from a doorway hard by, to see that his 
money was honestly earned, went off on his way. A 
devious way it turned out to be, for, having admitted 
his complicity to the Council, in his high and mighty 
fashion, he found himself safer in flight than in his 
guarded topmost room of this tower before us. He 
galloped away to his frontier of Flanders, cutting each 
bridge that he crossed. It was ten years before he 
could return, and then he came at the head of his Bur- 
gundian forces, and bought the keys of Porte de Buci, 
stolen by its keeper's son from under his father's pil- 
low. Entering Paris on the night of Saturday, May 
28, 1418, on the following day, the Burgundians be- 
gan those massacres which lasted as long as there were 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 59 

Armagnacs to kill, and which polluted Paris streets 
with corpses. Within a year, John, lured to a meet- 
ing with the Dauphin, afterward Charles VIL, went 
to the bridge at Montereau, with the infinite precautions 
always taken by this fearless man, and there he was 
murdered with no less treachery, if with less butchery, 
than he gave to his killing of Louis of Orleans. 

Valentine Visconti, widow of Orleans, had not lived 
to see this retribution. Her appeal to the King for the 
punishment of the assassin was answered by pleasant 
phrases, and soon after, in one of his sane intervals, 
was further answered by the royal pardon to Bur- 
gundy, for that " out of faith and loyalty to us, he has 
caused to be put out of the world our brother of Or- 
leans." She had counted on the King's remembering 
that, in the early years of his madness, hers had been 
the only face he knew and the only voice that soothed 
him. She crept away to Blois with her children, and 
with Dunois, her husband's son but not her own. The 
others were not of the age nor of the stuff to harbor 
revenge, and to him she said : " You were stolen from 
me, and it is you who are fit to avenge your father." 
These are fiery words from a rarely gentle yet cour- 
ageous woman, grown vindictive out of her constancy 
to a worthless man. She is the one pure creature, 
pathetic and undefiled, in all this welter of perfidy and 
brutality. " She shines in the black wreck of things," 
in Carlyle's words concerning another " noble white 
vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud eyes," 
of a later day. There, at Blois, she died within the year. 



6o THE STONES OF PARIS 

It would carry us too far from this tower to follow 
the course of the feud between the heirs of these two 
houses. " Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, Luxem- 
bourg, and Brabant, Earl of Holland and Zealand, Lord 
of Friesland, Count of Flanders, Artois, and Hainault, 
Lord of Salins and Macklyn," was a high and puissant 
prince, and versatile withal. " He could fight as well 
as any king going, and he could lie as well as any, ex- 
cept the King of France. He was a mighty hunter, and 
could read and write. His tastes were wide and ardent. 
He loved jewels like a woman, and gorgeous apparel. 
He dearly loved maids-of-honor, and, indeed, paintings 
generally, in proof of which he ennobled Jan van Eyck. 
. . . In short, he relished all rarities, except the 
humdrum virtues." Charles of Orleans, son of Louis, 
was of another kidney. Spirited at the start, this 
prince was spoiled by his training, " like such other 
lords as I have seen educated in this country," says 
Comines ; '' for these were taught nothing but to play 
the jackanapes with finery and fine words." Young 
Charles d'Orleans took his earliest lessons in rhyme, 
and he rhymed through life, through his twenty-five 
years of captivity in England, until he was old Charles, 
the pallid figure-head of a petty, babbling, versifying 
court. And the quarrel between the two houses came 
to nothing beyond the trifle of general misery for 
France. 

It was only when Burgundy came into collision with 
the crafty Dauphin of France, the rebellious son of 
Charles VII., who had fled from his father's court 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 6i 

and taken refuge with Duke Philip the Good, that this 
great house began to fail in power. When that Dau- 
phin, become Louis XL, made royal entry into Paris, 
this Hotel de Bourgogne showed all its old bravery. 
From its great court, through its great gate on Rue 
Saint-Denis, into the space behind the town gate of 
that name, Duke Philip rode forth on the last day of 
August, 1 46 1, at his side his son — then Comte de 
Charolais, known later as Charles " le Temeraire " — to 
head the glittering array of nobles, aglow with silken 
draperies and jewels, their horses' housings sweep- 
ing the ground, who await the new King. Few of them 
are quite sure " how they stand " with him, and they 
hardly know how to greet him as he enters, but they 
take the customary oaths when they get to Notre- 
Dame, and thence escort him to the old palace on the 
island. There they feasted and their royal master pre- 
tended to be jolly, all the while speculating on the 
speedy snuffing-out of these flashing satellites. On 
the morrow he took up his residence in the Hotel des 
Tournelles, almost deserted within, and altogether 
without. For the populace crowded about this Hotel 
de Bourgogne, all eyes and ears for the sight and the 
story of its splendors. Its tapestries were the richest 
ever seen by Parisians, its silver such as few princes 
owned, its table lavish and ungrudging. The duke's 
robes and jewels were so wonderful that the cheering 
mob ran after him, as he passed along the streets, with 
his attendant train of nobles and his body-guard of 
archers. 



62 THE STONES OF PARIS 

With his death died all the pomp and show of this 
palace. His son, Charles the Bold, wasted no time in 
Paris from the fighting, for which he had an incurable 
itch, but no genius. He kept this deserted house in 
charge of a concierge for his daughter Mary, " the 
richest heiress in Christendom," who was promised to 
five suitors at once, and who married Maximilian of 
Austria at last. Their grandson, the Emperor Charles 
v., in one of the many bargains made and unmade 
between him and Frangois I. — the one the direct de- 
scendant of Louis of Orleans and the other the direct 
descendant of John of Burgundy — gave up to the 
French crown all that Burgundy owned in France, 
one portion of it in Paris being this Hotel de Bour- 
gogne. By now this once most strongly fortified and 
best defended fortress-home in all the town was fallen 
into sad decay, its spacious courts the playground of 
stray children, its great halls and roomy chambers a 
refuge for tramps and rascals. So Francois, casting 
about for any scheme to bring in money, and greedy 
to keep alive the tradition, handed down from Hugh 
Capet, that gave to his crown all the ground on which 
Paris was built, sold at auction this old rookery, along 
with other royal buildings and land in the city, in the 
year 1543. This hotel was put up in thirteen lots, this 
tower and its dependencies, Burgundian additions of 
the first years of the fifteenth century, being numbered 
I, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, and while all the other structures 
were demolished, these were kept entire by the pur- 
chaser, whose name has not come down to us. They 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 63 

may have been " bid in " by the State, for they reap- 
pear as crown property of Louis XIII. ; and he gave 
'' what was left of the donjon of the Hotel d'Artois " 
to the monks of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Ecoliers, 
in exchange for a tract of their land on the northern side 
of Rue Saint- Antoine, just west of Place Royale. By 
this barter it would seem that he intended to carry 
out one of his father's cherished schemes, to be spoken 
of in a later chapter. 

In this donjon the good monks established '' store- 
houses " for the poor, a phrase that may be modernized 
into " soup-kitchens." These were under the control 
of a certain '' Pere Vincent," who has been canonized 
since as Saint Vincent de Paul. This peasant's son 
had grown up into a tender-hearted priest, bountiful 
to the poor with the crowns he adroitly wheedled from 
the rich. For he had guile as well as loving-kindness, 
he was a wily and a jocular shepherd to his aristocratic 
flock, he became the pet confessor of princesses and 
the spiritual monitor of Louis XIII. So zealous was 
he in his schemes for the relief of suffering men and 
women, and signally of children, that Parliament ex- 
postulated, in fear that his asylums and refuges would 
fill Paris with worthless vagrants and illegitimate chil- 
dren. His is an exemplary and honored figure in the 
Roman Church, and his name still clings to this tower ; 
local legend, by a curious twisting of tradition, mak- 
ing him its builder ! 

While its buyer, at the auction, is unknown to us, 
we do know to whom was knocked down one lot, that 



64 THE STONES OF PARIS 

holds records of deeper concern to us than all the 
ground hereabout, thick as it is with historic foot- 
prints. The plot on the southwesterly corner of the 
property, fronting on Rue Mauconseil, was purchased 
by a band of players for a rental in perpetuity. The 
Parliament of Paris had not recognized the King's 
claim to all these ownerships, and would not give as- 
sent to some of the sales ; and this perpetual lease was 
not confirmed by that body without long delay. We 
may let the players wait for this official warranty while 
we see who they are, whence they come, and what they 
play. 

It was a religious fraternity, calling itself " La Con- 
frerie de la Passion de Notre Seigneur, Jcsus-Christ/^ 
and it had been formed, during the closing years of 
the fourteenth century, mainly from out of more an- 
cient companies. The most ancient and reputable of 
these was "' La Basoche," recruited from the law clerks 
of the Palais de Justice, players and playwrights both. 
This troupe had enjoyed a long, popular existence be- 
fore it received legal existence from Philippe " le Bel," 
early in that same fourteenth century. From its ranks, 
reinforced by outsiders — among them, soon after 1450, 
a bachelor of the University, Francois Villon — were 
enlisted the members of " Les Enfants sans Souci." 
Other ribald mummers called themselves '' Les Sots." 
Men from all these bands brought their farcical gross- 
ness to mitigate the pietistic grossness of our Con- 
frerie, and this fraternity soon grew so strong as to 
get letters-patent from Charles VL, granting it per- 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 65 

mission for publicly performing passion-plays and 
mysteries, and for promenading the streets in costume. 
Then the privileged troupe hired the hall of Trinity 
Hospital and turned it into a rude theatre, the first in 
Paris, the mediaeval stage having been of bare boards 
on trestles, under the sky or under canvas. On the 
site of this earliest of French theatres are the Queen's 
fountain, placed in 1732 on the northeast corner of 
Rues Saint-Denis and Greneta, and the buildings num- 
bered 28 in the latter and 142 in the former street. 
There, in 1402, the confreres began the work that is 
called play, and there they remained until 1545. Then, 
during the construction of the new house, they took 
temporary quarters in the Hotel de Flandre, not yet cut 
up by its purchaser at the royal sale, and settled finally, 
in 1548, in the Theatre de I'Hotel de Bourgogne. By 
then an edict of Frangois I. had banished from the stage 
all personations of Jesus Christ and of all holy charac- 
ters ; such other plays being permitted as were " pro- 
fane and honest, offensive and injurious to no one." 

The name " mystery " does not suggest something 
occult and recondite, even although the Greek word, 
from which it is wrongly derived, sometimes refers 
to religious services ; it carries back, rather, to the 
Latin word signifying a service or an office. The 
plays called " mysteries " and " moralities " were given 
at first in mediaeval Latin, or, as time went on, in the 
vernacular, with interludes in the same Latin, which 
may be labelled Christian or late Latin. They were 
rudimentary essays in dramatic art, uncouth and gro- 



66 THE STONES OF PARIS 

tesque, in tone with that " twiHght of the mind, peopled 
with childish phantoms." Hugo's description of the 
" tres belle moralite, le bon jugemenf de Madame la 
Vierge," by Pierre Gringoire, played in the great hall 
of the Palais de Justice, is too long and labored to quote 
here ; well worth quoting is the short and vivid sketch, 
by Charles Reade, of the '' Morality " witnessed in 
puerile delight by the audience, among whom sat 
Gerard, the father of Erasmus, at Rotterdam, in the 
same brave days of Louis XL of France and Philip the 
Good of Burgundy. 

He shows us the clumsy machinery bringing divine 
personages, too sacred to name, direct from heaven 
down on the boards, that they might talk sophistry at 
their ease with the Cardinal Virtues, the Nine Muses, 
and the Seven Deadly Sins ; all present in human 
shape, and all much alike. This dreary stuff was then 
enlivened by the entrance of the Prince of the Powers 
of Air, an imp following him and buffeting him with 
a bladder, and at each thwack the crowd roared in 
ecstasy. So, to-day, the equally intelligent London 
populace finds joy in the wooden staff of the British 
Punch. When the Vices had vented obscenity and the 
Virtues twaddle, the Celestials with the Nine Muses 
went gingerly back to heaven on the one cloud allowed 
by the property-man, and worked up and down by 
two '' supes " at a winch, in full sight of everybody. 
Then the bottomless pit opened and flamed in the cen- 
tre of the stage, and into it the Vices were pushed 
by the Virtues and the stage-carpenters, who all, with 



THREE TIME-WOBN STAIRCASES 67 



Beelzebub, danced about it merrily to sound of fife and 
tabor. And the curtain falls on the first act. " This 
entertainment was writ by the Bishop of Ghent for the 
diffusion of religious sentiments by the aid of the 
senses, and was an average specimen of theatrical ex- 
hibitions, so long as they were in the hands of the 
clergy; but, in course of time, the laity conducted 
plays, and so the theatre, we learn from the pulpit, 
has become profane." 

The dulness of moralities and mysteries was relieved 
by the farces, spiced and not nice, of the " Sots " and the 
'' Basoche " on their boards. They made fun of earthly 
dignitaries, ridiculing even kings. Thus they repre- 
sented Louis XIL, in his Orleans thirst for money — 
never yet quenched in that family — drinking liquid 
gold from a vase. Their easy-going monarch took no 
offence, avowing that he preferred that his court should 
laugh at his parsimony, rather than that his subjects 
should weep for his prodigalities. To win applause, 
in his role of " le Pere du Peiiple," he encouraged the 
" powerful, disorderly, but popular theatre," and he 
patronized Pierre Gringoire, whose plays drew the 
populace to the booths about the Halles. The poet and 
playwright, widower of Hugo's happily short-lived 
Esmeralda, had been again married and put in good 
case by the whimsical toleration of Louis XL, if we 
may accept the dates of Theodore de Banville's charm- 
ing little play. That monarch, easily the first comedian 
of his time, allowed no rivals on the mimic stage, and 
it languished during his reign. Nor did it flourish 



68 THE STONES OF PARIS 

under Frangois L, whose brutal vices must not be 
made fun of. Henri IV., fearless even of mirth, which 
may be deadly, not only gave smiling countenance to 
this theatre, but gave his presence at times ; thus we 
read that, with queen and court, he sat through 
" ime plaisante farce " on the evening of January 12, 
1607. The Renaissance enriched the French stage, 
along with all forms of art, bringing translations 
through the Italian of the classic drama. The theatre 
of the Hotel de Bourgogne became La Comedie Ital- 
ienne, and its records recall famous names, on the 
boards and in the audience, throughout long and hon- 
orable years. The troupe was not free from jealousies, 
and did not escape secessions, notably that of 1598, 
when the heavy old men of the historic house cut 
adrift the light comedians and the young tragedians, 
who had been recruited within a few years, mainly 
from the country. Those who remained devoted them- 
selves to the '' legitimate drama," yet found place for 
approved modern work, such as that of young Racine. 
The seceders betook themselves to buildings on the 
east side of Rue de Renard, just north of Rue de la 
Verrerie, convenient to the crowded quarter of la 
Greve ; but removed shortly to the theatre constructed 
for them from a tennis-court in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, 
in the heart of the populous Marais. You shall go 
there, a little later, to see the classic dramas of a young 
man from Rouen, named Corneille. These players 
called themselves '' Les Comediens du Marais," and by 
1620 had permission from Louis XIII. to take the title 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 69 



of "La Troupe Royale." A few years later, perhaps 
as early as 1650, all the Paris of players and playgoers 
began to talk about a strolling troupe in the southern 
provinces and about their manager, one Poquelin de 
Moliere. How he brought his comedies and his com- 
pany to the capital ; how he put them both up in rivalry 
with the twO' old stock houses; how he won his way 
against all their opposition, and much other antagon- 
ism — this is told in our chapter on Moliere. 

In the cutting up of the ancient domain of Robert 
of Artois, after the royal sale, a short street was run 
north and south through the grounds, and named 
Francois, since feminized into Rue Frangaise. It lay 
between the tower, whose lower wall may be seen in 
the rear of the court of No. 8, and the theatre build- 
ings, which covered the sites of present Nos. 7 and 9 
of this street and extended over the ground that now 
makes Rue Etienne Marcel. The main entrance of the 
theatre was about where now hangs the big gilt key 
on the northern side of that fragment of Rue Maucon- 
seil, still left after its curtailment by many recent cut- 
tings. Gone now is every vestige of the theatre and 
every stone of the Hotel de Bourgogne, except this 
tower of " J ean-sans-Peur." 

By happy chance, or through pious care, this pre- 
cious fragment has survived the centuries that looked 
with unconcern on things of the past, and has come 
into the safe keeping of our relic-loving age. It is an 
authentic document from the archives of the earliest 
architecture of the fifteenth century, convincing in its 



70 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



proof of the strength for defence of ducal homes in 
that day. Its massive stones are scrupulously shaped 
and fitted, the grim faces of its quadrangular walls are 
softened by wide ogival windows, its top is crowned 
all around by a deep cornice. Above, the former cor- 
belled machicolations, heavy yet elegant, are debased 




The Tower of *' Jean-sans-Peur." 



THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES 71 

into water-spouts, and a new roof has been added. 
Only the southern and eastern sides of the oblong are 
wholly disengaged, the other faces being mostly shut 
in by crowding buildings. On the angle behind is a 
tourelle supported by corbels, and in the ogival door is 
a tympanum, in whose carvings we make out a plane 
and a plumb-line. This was the device of John of 
Burgundy, worn on his liveries, painted and carved 
everywhere. Louis of Orleans had chosen a bunch 
of knotted fagots as his emblem, with the motto " Je 
Vennuie; " and Burgundy's arrogant retort was the 
plane that cut through all that was not in plumb-line 
with his measurements, and the motto in Flemish " Ik 
houd,'' meaning " Je le Hens/' 

The great hall within has been partitioned off into 
small rooms, fit for the workingmen and their families 
formerly installed here ; so that its ancient aspect 
of amplitude and dignity is somewhat marred. We 
" must make believe very much," to see either the 
sinner John mustering here his assassins, who file out 
through that door to their rendezvous with Orleans, 
or the saint Vincent gathering here his herd of hun- 
gry children. Happily, the grand stairway, on one 
side, is unmutilated, and it serves to bring home to 
us the ample magnificence of these Burgundian dukes. 
Dagobert's stair crawls, through twisting darkness, 
within its tower; Blanche's stair modestly suggests 
a venture toward ease and elegance in life; here we 
mount the stairway of a feudal chateau, broad and 
easy and stately, fitting frame for bejewelled courtiers 



72 THE STONES OF PARIS 

and iron-clad men-at-arms. Its one hundred and 
thirty-eight steps, each a single stone, turn spaciously 
about the central column, which does not reach to the 
tower top. Its upper section is carved into a stone 
pot, from which springs a stone oak-tree to the centre 
of the vaulted ceiling of the broad platform that ends 
the stairway, the ribs of the vaulting outlined by carved 
branches and foHage. On each floor below, a large 
chamber, deserted and dreary, opens on the landing- 
place; from this upper stage a narrow staircase leads, 
through the thickness of the wall and up through the 
tourelle on the angle, to the tiny chamber occupied by 
John of Burgundy, tradition tells us. Here in his bed- 
room, that was an arsenal, at the top of his impregna- 
ble tower, the fearless one found safety and sleep. We 
peep out from his one small window, and far down 
we see the swarming length of Rue Etienne Marcel, 
and hear the low pervasive murmur of Paris all astir, 
accented by the shrill cries of the boys from the ad- 
joining school, at play in the courtyard of our tower. 
Their voi-ces chase back to their shadowy haunts all 
these companions of our stroll through the ages, and 
call us down to our own time and to our Paris of 
to-day. 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER OF THE 
MIDDLE AGES 




The Church of Saint-Severin. 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER OF THE 
MIDDLE AGES 

On that river-bank of the City-Island which is called 
Quai aux Fleurs, you will find a modern house num- 
bered 1 1 ; and you will read, in the gold letters of the 
weather-stained stone slab set in the front wall, that 
here, in 1118, dwelt Heloise and Abelard. Their ideal 
heads are carved over the two entrance doors. This is 
the site of the pleasant residence occupied by Canon 
Fulbert, looking across its own garden and the beach 
to the river — one of the dwellings in the cloisters that 
were set apart for the clergy and clerks of the cathedral, 
and of the many parish churches clustering about it. 
The chapter of Notre-Dame owned nearly all this end 
of the island eastwardly from the boundaries of the old 
Palace, and had built up this clerical village of about 
three dozen small houses, each within its garden and 
clump of acacias, all sequestered and quiet. You may 
see one of these houses, still owned by the cathedral, 
and happily left unchanged, at No. 6 Rue Massillon. 
Its low two stories and tiled roof on the court keep 
their old-time look, and within is a good staircase, with 
a wooden railing of the days before wrought iron came 
into use. Boileau-Despreaux has mounted this stair- 

75 



76 THE STONES OF PARIS 

case, for he certainly visited this abode of the Abbe 
Menage, who had hterary and scientific salons here, on 
Wednesday evenings. Boileau himself lived in these 
cloisters for many years, and here he died ; and here 
had died Philibert Delorme and Pierre Lescot. These 
and many another, not connected with the Church, 
sought this quarter for its quiet. It was quiet enough, 
shut in as it was by its own walls, that made of it a 
cite inside the City of the Island. The two gates at the 
western ends of present Rues du Cloitre-Notre-Dame 
and Chanoinesse, with two others on the shore, were 
safely closed and barred at nightfall, against all intru- 
sion of the profane and noisy world without. So greedy 
for quiet had the dwellers grown, that they would not 
permit the bridge — the Pont-Rouge, the seventeenth- 
century predecessor of Pont Saint-Louis — to step 
straight out from Saint Louis's island to their own, lest 
the speed of traffic should perturb them ; they made it 
turn at an angle, until it set its twisted foot on the re- 
tired spot where now Rues des Ursins and des Chantres 
meet in a small open space. The southern shore by the 
side of the cathedral was given up to the Archbishop's 
palace and garden ; and the piece of waste land, behind 
the cathedral and outside the wall, known as Le Ter- 
rain, was in 1750 banked up into the quay at the end 
of the present pretty garden. All around the northern 
and eastern sides of the original Notre-Dame, stretched 
the Gothic arched cloisters, and in them the Church 
taught what little it thought fit its scholars should learn. 
Here, toward the end of the eleventh century, Pierre 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 77 



Abelard was an eager pupil of Guillaume de Cham- 
peaux ; and early in the next century, here and in the 
gardens of Saint-Genevieve, he was a honey-tongued 
teacher. He lodged in the house of Canon Fulbert, in 
whose niece of seventeen — less than half his own age 
— he found an ardent learner, not alone in theology. 
Here, on this spot, she taught herself that devotion 
to the poor-spirited lover who was so bold-spirited a 
thinker; a devotion, that, outlasting his life by the 
twenty years of her longer life, found expression in 
her dying wish, put into verse by Alexander Pope : 

" May one kind Grave unite each hapless Name, 
And graft my Love immortal on thy Fame." 

He died at the Priory of Saint-Marcel near Chalons, 
whose prior sent the body, at her request, to Heloise, 
then Abbess of the Convent at Nogent-sur-Seine, and 
famed as a miracle of erudition and piety. She was 
buried in the grave she there dug for him, and in 1800, 
when her convent was destroyed, leaving no stone, the 
tomb and its contents were removed to the Museum of 
French Monuments in Paris, and in 1817 they were 
placed in Pere-Lachaise. 

We willingly lose sight of Abelard's sorry story in 
face of his splendid powers. These came into play at 
a period of mental and spiritual awakening, brought 
about by unwonted light from all quarters of the sky. 
Theological questions filled the air ; asked, not only by 
priests and clerks, but by the silly crowd and by wist- 
ful children, and by gray-headed men sitting on school 



78 THE STONES OF PARIS 



benches. The Crusades, faihng in material conquest, 
had won the Holy Land of Eastern Learning ; and Con- 
stantinople, lost later to the Christian world, gave 
to it fleeing Greek scholars, carrying precious manu- 
scripts, Byzantine logic and physics, all through Eu- 
rope. Pious soldiers, coming home with wealth ; stay- 
at-home churchmen, who had amassed riches ; royalty, 
anxious to placate Rome — all these built colleges, 
founded scholarships, endowed chairs, subsidized 
teachers. 

From the cloisters on the island — the cradle of the 
University, as the Palace at the other end of the island 
was the cradle of the Town — from the new cathedral 
that Abelard had not seen, the schools stepped over to 
the mainland on the south. There, on the shore, were 
built the College of the Four Nations, and the School of 
Medicine, alongside that annex of the old Hotel-Dieu, 
which was reached by the little bridge, that went only 
the other day, and that led from the central structure 
on the island. From this shore the scholars' quarter 
spread up the slope to the summit of Mont-Sainte-Gene- 
vieve. There teachers and scholars met in the clois- 
ters of the great abbey, that had grown up around the 
tomb of the patron saint of Paris, where now stands the 
Pantheon. Of the huge basilica, its foundations laid 
by Clovis — who had paid for a victory by his baptism 
into Christianity — there is left the tower, rising, aged 
and estranged, above the younger structures of the 
Lycee Henri IV. Its foundations under ground are of 
Clovis, its lower portion is of eleventh-century rebuild- 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 79 

ing, its upper portion of the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries. The plan of his cloisters, and some of its 
stones, are kept in the arches of the college court, to 
which one enters from No. 23 Rue Clovis. And, in the 
street named for his wife, Clotilde, you may see the 
massive side wall of the abbey refectory, now the col- 
lege chapel. 

Around about the southern side of the abbey, and 
around the schools on the slope below, that were the 
beginning of the University, Philippe-Auguste threw 
the protecting arm of his great wall. Within its clasp 
lay the Pays Latin, wherein that tongue was used ex- 
clusively in those schools. This language, sacred to 
so-called learning and unknown to the vulgar, seemed 
a fit vehicle for the lame science of the doctor, and the 
crippled dialectics of the theologian, both always in 
arms against the '' new learning." It was not until the 
close of Henri IV.'s reign, that it was thought worth 
while to use the French language in the classes. All 
through the Middle Ages, this University was a world- 
centre for its teaching, and through all the ages it has 
been *' that prolific soil in which no seeds, which have 
once been committed to it, are ever permitted to per- 
ish." While la Cite was the seat of a militant Church, 
and la Ville the gathering-place of thronging merchants, 
this hill-side swarmed with students, and their officials 
were put to it to house them properly and keep them 
orderly. They got on as best they might, ill-lodged, ill- 
fed, ill-clad, often begging, always roistering, in the 
streets. By day the sedate burghers of the other quar- 



8o THE STONES OF PARIS 

ters trembled for their ducats and their daughters, and 
found peace only when night brought the locking of 
the gate of the Petit-Chatelet, and the shutting up in 
their own district of the turbulent students. 

Turbulent still, the students of our day, of every land 
and all tongues — except Latin — stream through the 
streets of the Latin Quarter, intent on study, or on 
pleasure bent. Only the Revolution has ever thinned 
their ranks, what time the Legislative Assembly near- 
ly wrecked the parent University, with all its offspring 
throughout France. Napoleon rescued them all, and 
by his legislation of 1806 and 1808, the University 
has been builded solidly on the foundations of the 
State. The ancient scholars' quarter, unlighted and un- 
drained and unhealthful, is almost all gone ; its narrow, 
tortuous streets are nearly all widened or wiped out; 
open spaces and gardens give it larger lungs ; its dark, 
damp, mouldy colleges have made way for grandiose 
structures of the latest sanitation. Yet the gray walls 
of the annex of the Hotel-Dieu still gloom down on the 
narrow street ; the fifteenth-century School of Medi- 
cine, its vast hall perverted to base uses, is hidden be- 
hind the entrance of No. 15 Rue de la Bucherie; and 
above the buildings on the west side of Rue de I'Hotel- 
Colbert rises the rotunda of its later amphitheatre. Rue 
Galande retains many of its houses of the time of 
Charles IX., when these gables on the street were 
erected. Except for the superb fa<;ade at No. 29 Rue 
de la Parcheminerie — a municipal residence dating 
from about the middle of the eighteenth century — that 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 



8i 




Rue Hautefeuille, a Survivor of the Scholars' Quarter. 



venerable street remains absolutely unaltered since its 
very first days, when the parchment-makers took it for 
their own. Some of their parchment seems to be still 
on sale in its shop windows. In the ancient house No. 
8 Rue Boutebrie you will find as perfect a specimen 



82 THE STONES OF PARIS 

of a mediaeval staircase, its wooden rail admirably 
carved, as is left in Paris. And the street of the Moun- 
tain of Sainte-Genevieve still winds, stonily steep, up 
the slope. 

Nothing of Rue du Fouarre, as it was known to 
Rabelais and Dante, is left but its name in the broadened 
curtailment of this most ancient street. That name 
comes from the old French word meaning '' forage," 
and was given to it at the time when the wealthier stu- 
dents bought near there and brought into it the trusses 
of hay and straw, which they spread on the floor for 
seats during the lectures, the reader himself being 
seated on a rude dais at the end of the hall. The for- 
age market is still held, not far away, in Place Maubert. 
And the churches of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and of 
Saint-Severin are unchanged, except by age, since 
those days when their bells were the only timekeepers 
for lecturers and lectured; giving signal, throughout 
the day, for the divisions of the classes, until vespers 
told that the working-day was done. The schools 
opened with the early mass at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, 
then the chapel adjoining the Hotel-Dieu, now an ex- 
quisite relic of simple twelfth-century Gothic. Still 
older had been Saint-Severin, a chapel of the earliest 
years of the monarchy, destroyed by the Normans when 
they camped just here in 866, besieging the island city 
and making their onslaught on the wooden tower that 
guarded the abutment of the Petit-Pont on the main- 
land. The twelve heroes, who held that tower against 
the Norman horde, are commemorated by the tablet 




> 



J3 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 83 



in the wall of Place du Petit-Pont. Saint-Severin was 
rebuilt in the thirteenth century, and its vast burial- 
ground on the south covered by the buildings and the 
street of la Parcheminerie. So that of the University 
seen by Dante, we can be sure only of the body of Saint- 
Severin — its tower was built in 1347 — and of Saint- 
Julien-le-Pauvre, and the buildings that are glued to it. 
Dante's bronze figure looks pensively down from the 
terrace of the College de France on all the noise and 
the newness of modern Rue des Ecoles. The date of 
his short stay in Paris cannot be fixed, but it was cer- 
tainly after his exile from Florence, therefore not 
earlier than 1302, and probably not later than 13 10, his 
own years being a little less, or a little more, than forty. 
There can be no doubt as to his having visited Paris, 
for Boccaccio, his admirer and biographer, records the 
fact; told him perhaps by the elder Boccaccio, who 
lived in the capital — where his famous son was born 
— and who probably met the expatriated poet there. 
And in the tenth canto of " Paradiso" we find these 
words in Longfellow's translation: 

" It is the light eternal of Sigieri, 

Who, reading lectures in the street of straw, 
Did syllogize individious verities." 

This closing line, meaning that Sigier of Brabant 
had the courage to speak truths that were unpopular, 
explains why he was Dante's favorite lecturer. In Bal- 
zac's pretty fragment of romance, in which the great 
Frenchman makes so vivid the presence of the great 



84 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Italian, the home of the latter is in one of the small 
houses on the extreme eastern end of the City Island 
— such as the modest dwelling in which died Boileau- 
Despreaux, four centuries later. From there, Balzac 
has Dante ferried over to Quai de la Tournelle, and 
so stroll to his lectures. But Dante's home was really 
in that same street of straw, to which he had come from 
his quarters away south on the banks of the Bievre, too 
far away from the schools. He had taken up his abode 
in that rural suburb, on first coming to Paris, as did 
many men of letters, of that time and of later times, 
who were drawn to the pleasant, quiet country without 
the walls. 

There was one among these men to whose home, tra- 
dition tells us, Dante was fond of finding his way, after 
he had come to live in the narrow town street. The 
grave figure goes sedately up Rue Saint- Jacques, al- 
ways the great southern thoroughfare, passing the an- 
cient chapel of the martyrs, Saint-Benoit-le-Betourne, 
and the home and shelter for poor students in theology, 
started by the earnest confessor of Saint Louis, Robert 
de Sorbon. The foundations of his little chapel, built 
in 1276, were unearthed in 1899 during the digging for 
the new Sorbonne ; and its walls are outlined in white 
stone in the gray pavement of the new court. Not a 
stone remains of the old Sorbonne, not a stone of the 
rebuilt Sorbonne of Richelieu, except his chapel and 
his tomb ; well worth a visit for the exquisite beauty of 
its detail. But the soul of the historic foundation lives 
on, younger than ever to-day, in its seventh century of 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 85 



youth. Through Porte Saint-Jacques, Dante passes 
to the dwelHng, just beyond, of Jean de Meung, its site 
now marked by a tablet in the wall of the house No. 218 
Rue Saint- Jacques. No doubt it was a sufficiently 
grand mansion in its own grounds, for it was the home 
of the well-to-do parents of the poet, whose lameness 
gave him the popular nickname of " Clopinel," pre- 
ferred by him to the name by which he is best known, 
which came from his natal town. In this home, a few 
years earlier, he had finished his completion of '' Le 
Roman de la Rose," one of the earliest of French 
poems, a biting satire on women and priests, begun by 
Guillaume de Lorris. *' Clopinel " carried on the un- 
finished work to such perfection, that he is commonly 
looked on as the sole author. Dante admired the work 
as fully as did Chaucer, who has left a translation into 
English of a portion : — so admirable a version that it 
moved Eustace Deschamps to enthusiasm in his ballad 
to " le grand tramlateur, noble Geoffroi Chancer/' 
And Dante liked the workman as well, his equal in 
genius, many of their contemporaries believed ; and we 
shall not aggrieve history, if we insist on seeing the 
grim-visaged Florentine and the light-hearted Gaul 
over a bottle of petit vin de Vouvray or de Chinon — 
for the vineyards of this southern slope of Paris had 
been rooted up by the builder early in the twelfth cen- 
tury — in the low-browed living-room, discussing po- 
etry and politics, the schism in the Church, the quarrel 
between the French King and his spiritual father of 
Rome. 



86 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Behind us in Rue Saint- Jacques, beneath the new 
Sorbonne, we have left the site of the chapel of Saint- 
Benoit-le-Betourne. The entrance to its cloisters and 
gardens was opposite Rue du Cimetiere-Saint-Benoit, 
a short street, now widened, that retains a few of its 
ancient houses, the cemetery at its farther end being 
entirely builded over. This entrance-gate is standing 
in the gardens of the Cluny Museum, and we see it as it 
was first seen by the boy Francois Villon, and last seen 
when he fled under it, after killing a priest in the clois- 
ters. He got his name from the worthy canon of Saint- 
Benoit, Guillaume de Villon, who took in the waif and 
gave him a roof and food, and tried to give him 
morals ; and it is by his name that the poet is known in 
history rather than by the other names, real or assumed, 
that he bore during his shifty life. He lived here with 
his '' more than father," as the young scamp came to 
own that the canon had been ; whose house in the clois- 
ter gardens, named " la Porte Rouge," was not far 
from the house of the canon Pierre de Vaucel, with 
whose niece Francois got into his first scrape. Loving 
her then, he libelled her later in his verse. 

Full of scrapes of all sorts were his thirty short years 
of life — he was born in the year of the burning of Joan 
the Maid, and he slips out of sight and of record in 1461 
— and it needed all his nimble wits to keep his toes from 
dangling above ground and his neck from swinging in 
a noose. They did not keep him from poverty and 
hunger and prison. Parliament, nearly hanging him, 
banished him instead from Paris, and the footsore cock- 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 87 



ney figure is seen tramping through Poitou, Berri, 
Bourbonnais. Louis XL finds him in a cell at Meung 
and, sympathizing with rascality that was not political, 
sets him free and on foot again ; so playing Providence 
to this starveling poet as he did to Gringoire. And 
from Meung, Frangois Villon steals out of history, 
leaving to us his " Small " and " Large Testament," a 
few odes and sonnets, with bits of wholly exquisite 
song. No French poet before him had put himself 
into his verse, and it is this flavor of personality that 
gives its chiefest charm to his work. We are won 
by the graceless vagabond, who casts up and tells off 
his entire existence of merriment and misery, in the 
words of Mr. Henley's superb translation : 

" Booze and the blowens cop the lot." 

He seems to be owning to it, this slight, alert figure 
of bronze in Square Monge, as he faces the meeting- 
place of wide modern streets. The spaciousness of it all 
puzzles him, who prowled about the darkest purlieus, 
and haunted the uncleanest cabarets, of the old Uni- 
versity quarter. He is struck suddenly quiescent in his 
swagger ; his face, slightly bent down, shows the poet 
dashed with the reprobate ; his expression and attitude 
speak of struggling shame and shamelessness. His 
right hand holds a manuscript to his breast, his left 
hand clasps the dagger in his belt. Behind, on the 
ground, lie the mandolin of the poet-singer and the 
shackles of the convict. It is a delightfully expressive 
statue of Francois Villon, by his own election one of 



88 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the " Enfant s sans Souci," and by predestination a 
child of grievous cares. 

From Square Monge it is but a step to the tablet that 
marks the place of Porte Saint- Victor, on the northern 
side of the remnant left of the street of that name. It is 
but a step in the other direction to the tablet on the wall 
of No. 50 Rue Descartes, which shows the site of Porte 
Saint-Marcel, sometimes called the Porte Bordee. 
Through either of these gates of the great wall one 
might pass to the home of a poet, a hundred years after 
Villon had gone from sight ; like him, born to true poet- 
ry, but unlike him who was born to rags, Pierre de Ron- 
sard was born to the purple. He was a gentleman of 
noble lineage, he had been educated at the famous Col- 
lege de Navarre, the college at that period of Henri HI. 
and of the Duke of Guise, le Balafre — its site and its 
prestige since taken by the Ecole Polytechnique — he had 
entered the court of the Duke of Orleans as a page, he 
had gone to Scotland as one of the escort of Madeleine of 
France, on her marriage with James V. He was counted 
among the personal friends of Mary Stuart and of 
Charles IX., and by him was selected always as a part- 
ner in tennis. That King visited Ronsard here, and so, 
too, did his brother Henri III. Tasso found his way 
here, while in Paris in 1571, in the train of Cardinal 
Louis d'Este. It seems that nothing in all France was 
to Tasso's taste, except the windmills on Montmartre ; 
easily in view, at that day, from the Louvre, at whose 
windows he watched the ceaseless whirling of their 
sails, which mitigated his boredom. Twenty years 



P^^^JOH^V^^ 



^^ 





/>^"^::3M:::ik 



♦'l^ 




^il*'^ 



Pierre de Ronsard. 

(From a drawing by an unknown artist, in a private collection.) 



{From a carbon print by Braun, Clement df Co.] 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 89 



earlier, Rabelais was fond of ferrying across the river, 
from his home in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, to prowl 
about his once familiar haunts in this quarter, and to 
drop in on Ronsard and Baif, the leaders of the school 
of " learned poets." They lived in Rue des Fosses- 
Saint-Victor, the street formed over the outer ditch of 
the wall, now named Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Their 
house and grounds, just at the corner of present Rue 
des Boulangers, have been cut through and away by 
the piercing of Rue Monge. Here, Ronsard looked 
across the meadows to the Seine, while he strolled in the 
gardens, book in hand, eager " to gather roses while it 
is called to-day," in the words of Mr. Andrew Lang's 
version of the " Prince of Poets." For Ronsard's deaf- 
ness, which had cut short his adroit diplomatic career, 
had given him quicker vision for all beauty; and his 
verse, Greek and Latin and French, trips to the music 
made in him by the sights and scents of summer, by 
roses and by women, by the memories of '* shadow- 
loves and shadow-lips." And, still rhyming, this most 
splendid of that constellation — those singers, attuned 
to stately measure, called the Pleiades— died in the 
year 1585, soon after his sixtieth birthday. 

From here we go straight away over the hill of 
Sainte-Genevieve and through Porte Saint-Michel— 
nearly at the meeting-place of Rues Soufflot and Mon- 
sieur-le-Prince and Boulevard Saint-Michel — to the 
house, also in the fields outside the wall, where dwelt 
Clement Marot, a poet who sang pleasantly of the 
graces of life, too, but who had a more serious strain 



go THE STONES OF PARIS 

deep down. The " Cheval d'Airan " — so was the house 
named — was a gift to the poet from Francois I. '' for 
his good, continuous, and faithful services." These 
services consisted chiefly in the writing of roundelays 
and verses, in which " he had a turn of his own," says 
Sainte-Beuve ; a turn of grace and of good breeding, 
and no passion that should startle the King's sister, 
good Marguerite of Navarre, who had made him her 
groom of the chamber. He had been a prisoner at Pavia 
with the King, and his life had been spent in the camp 
and the court. At Ferrara, in 1534, he had met his 
fellow-countryman Calvin, and returned to Paris to 
prove his strengthened convictions in the new heresies 
by those translations of the psalms, which carried com- 
fort to Calvin and to Luther, and which have given to 
their writer his permanent place in French literature. 
During this period he lived in this grand mansion, the 
site of which is exactly covered by the houses No. 27 
Rue de Tournon and No. 30 Rue de Conde. And from 
here Marot went into exile, along with the well-to-do 
Huguenots, who clung together in this quarter outside 
the wall. " Nous autres Vappelons la Petite Geneve," 
said d'Aubigne, and that appellation held for a long 
time. Its centre was the short, narrow lane in the 
marshes, named later Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 
and now Rue Visconti, wherein the persecuted sect had 
their hidden place of worship. On its corner with 
the present Rue de Seine was the home of Jean Cousin, 
that gentleman-worker in stained glass — the sole handi- 
craft allowed to men of birth — who has left for our 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER gt 

joy that exquisite window in the Church of Saint-Ger- 
vais. At the western end of the lane was the residence 
built for himself by Baptiste Du Cerceau, son of the 
illustrious Jacques Androuet, and as stanch as was 
his father for the faith. His great mansion took up 
the whole end of the block, on the ground covered now 
by the equally large building that makes 32 Rue Jacob, 
21 Rue Bonaparte, and 23 and 25 Rue Visconti. A 
portion of this latter structure may be of the sixteenth 
century. Baptiste Du Cerceau, a Huguenot by birth 
and bringing-up, had yet joined Henri HI.'s famous 
" Forty-Five," in 1575, when he was only twenty years 
old. For ten years he served that King as soldier and 
architect, and then, rather than attend mass or conform 
against his convictions, he left King and court and 
home in 1585. He came back with Henri IV. as royal 
architect, to find that his elegant residence had fallen 
into ruin. 

When Bernard Palissy, released from his dungeon in 
Bordeaux, came to Paris, he was made " Worker in 
Earth and Inventor of Rustic Figulines," for the new 
abode in the Tile Fields, beyond the Louvre, that was 
planned for the Queen-Mother, Catherine de' Medici. 
" Bernard of the Tuileries," as he was known, in order 
to be near his work, lodged on the northern side of Rue 
Saint-Honore, just east of present Rue de Castiglione. 
Later he removed to Rue du Dragon, nearly opposite 
the little street now named in his honor, and so be- 
came one of the colony of " la Petite Geneve." Here he 
worked as he worked always in his passion for perfec- 



92 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



tion in ornamental pottery, giving to it all " my affec- 
tion for pursuing in the track of enamels/' in his own 
quaint words. For his single-mindedness in praising 
his Creator, and in making worthy images of His crea- 
tions, he was looked on as a "" huguenot opinidtre/' and 
hated by the powers of the Church and State, who, fail- 



■^ 1' " ^-X 




Balcony over the Entrance of the Cour du Dragon. 

ing to burn him, because of the mercy of the Duke of 
Mayenne, cast him into the Bastille. With all Paris 
hungry, during the siege of the League by Henry of 
Navarre, the prisoners took their turn, and this old 
man renewed the experience of his youth, when he had 
starved himself for his beloved enamels. And so, at the 
age of eighty, in the year of the stabbing by Jacques 
Clement of the most Christian King, Henri HI., Ber- 
nard Palissy died in his cell " naturally," the report 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 93 

said. A medallion of the great potter may be seen 
over the entrance of a house in Rue du Dragon, and 
his statue stands in the little garden of Saint-Germain- 
des-Pres, not far away. He is in his workman's garb, 
gazing down at a platter on which he has stamped his 
genius in clay. 

We have seen John Calvin, fresh from Picardy, a 
student at the College du Cardinal-Lemoine, in Rue 
Saint- Victor, and this is his only residence in Paris 
known to us. Appointed Cure of Pont I'Eveque, at 
the age of sixteen, he was induced by a daring relative 
to read the Bible, and the ultimate result was Calvinism, 
as it has been interpreted by his bigoted disciples. The 
immediate result was his persecution by the Sorbonne, 
and his flight to Ferrara, about the year 1534. There 
he met with welcome and protection, as did many a 
political fugitive of the time, from Renee, the reign- 
ing duchess, as kindly a creature as was her father, 
Louis XII. of France. But her good-will could not pre- 
vail against the ill-will of the Church, and Calvin was 
forced to find his way finally to Switzerland, to live 
there for thirty useful years. Marot, who was with 
Calvin in Ferrara, went back to Paris, still counte- 
nanced at court ; but no favor of king or king's sister 
could save a sinner who would eat meat during Lent ; 
and in 1543 Marot was forced to flee to Italy, and died 
in Turin in 1544. He lives less in his special verse 
than in his general influence, along with Rabelais and 
Montaigne, in the formation of French letters. These 
three cleansed that language into literature, by purg- 



94 THE STONES OF PARIS 

ing it of the old Gallic chaos and clumsiness of 
form. 

So the Church made a desert, and called it peace, and 
/' Little Geneva " was at last laid waste, and those lead- 
ers, who escaped the cell and the stake, were made refu- 
gees, because they had been insurgents against enslaved 
thought. But they left behind them him who has been 
styled the " Martyr of the Renaissance," Etienne Dolet. 
Here, in Place Maubert, this bronze figure on the high 
pedestal, which he somehow makes serve as a Prot- 
estant pulpit, looks all the martyr, with his long, stub- 
born neck, his stiff spine of unbending conviction, his 
entire attitude of aggressive devotion to principle. In 
life he was so strong and so genuine that he made 
friends almost as many as enemies. That glorious 
woman. Marguerite of Navarre — whose absurd devo- 
tion to her brother Francis is only a lovable flaw in 
her otherwise faultless nature — stood by Dolet as she 
stood by so many men who had the courage to study 
and think and speak. She saved him from execution, 
when he had killed a man in self-defence at Lyons, 
and she should have been allowed to sit at table with 
the friends who gave him a little dinner in the Pays 
Latin to celebrate his escape. Among those about the 
board were Marot, Rabelais, Erasmus, Melancthon, 
tradition says, and says no more. We are told noth- 
ing about the speechmakers, and we can only guess 
that they were terribly in earnest. Dolet was soon 
again in arrest for printing books forbidden by the 
Church ; his trial resulted in an acquittal. Soon again 




Clement Marot. 

(From the portrait by Porbus le Jeune, in a private collection.) 



\From a carbon print by Braun, Climenf &f Co.] 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 95 

he was arrested for importing the forbidden Hterature, 
and escaped from prison. Rearrested, he was speed- 
ily convicted, and on August 3, 1546, he was burned 
in Place Maubert, on the spot where they have put 
his statue. 

It was during one of his visits in later life to Paris 
that Erasmus came to be among these convives; per- 
haps at the time he was considering, before declining, 
the offer of Francois I. to make him the head of the 
great College Royal, planned — and no more than 
planned — by the King on the site of the Hotel de Nesle, 
where Mazarin afterward placed his College of the 
Four Nations, now the seat of the Institute. Many 
years before this visit, some time between 1492 and 
1497, Erasmus had lived in Paris, a poor and unhappy 
student in the College Montaigu. It had earned the 
nickname of " College des Haricots/' because of the 
Lenten fare lavished on its inmates — beans, stale eggs, 
spoiled fish, and that monotony broken by frequent 
fasts. Erasmus had a Catholic conscience, as he owns, 
but a Lutheran stomach withal, and this semi-starva- 
tion, with the filth and fleas in the rooms, sickened 
him and drove him home to cleanly and well-fed Flan- 
ders. From this college, he says in his " Colloquia," 
'' I carried nothing but a body infected with disease, 
and a plentiful supply of vermin." A few years later 
young Rabelais suffered similar horrors at the same 
college, and has cursed its memories through Gran- 
gousier's capable lips. This " galley for slaves " was 
indeed used as a prison during the Revolution, and 



g6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

was torn down in 1845, to give place to the Biblio- 
theque Sainte-Genevieve. 

From Place Maubert we walk up Rue Monge — 
named from the great savant of the First Empire — 
and down to the seventeenth century, to where, on the 
corner of Rue Rollin, we find the tablet that records 
the scene of Blaise Pascal's death in 1662. He lived 
and died in the house of his sister, in the fields just be- 
yond Porte Saint-Marcel. Thirty-one years before, he 
had left Auvergne for Paris, a precocious lad of eight, 
already so skilled in mathematics and geometry that 
he produced his famous treatises while still in his teens, 
and at the age of twenty-three was known for his abil- 
ities throughout Europe. No man dying, as he did, 
not yet forty years of age, has left so distinct and per- 
manent an impress on contemporary, and on later, 
thought. 

He gained the honor of being hated by the Church, 
and the Jesuits named him "Porte d'Enfer." His 
only answer was the philosophic question, " How can 
I prove that I am not the gate of Hell ? " This 
many-sided genius invented the first calculating ma- 
chine and the first omnibus. The line was started on 
March 18, 1662, and ran from the Palace of the Luxem- 
bourg to the Bastille. Its route was probably by Rue 
de la Harpe — almost all gone under Boulevard Saint- 
Michel — across Petit-Pont and the Island and Pont 
Notre-Dame, to Place de Greve, and thence by Rues 
Frangois-Miron and Saint-Antoine, to the gate and 
the prison at the end. 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER 97 

It was long a matter of dispute between the towers 
of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie and Saint-Jacques- 
du-Haut-Pas — this latter much nearer his home — as 
to which one had been selected by Pascal for the ex- 
periments he made, to prove his theory of atmospheric 
pressure, and to refute the theory of his opponents. 
Within a few years this question has been answered 
by an old painting, found in a curiosity shop, which 
represents Pascal, barometer in hand, standing on the 
top of Saint- Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, beside the statue 
of the Chimsera, that has been carried to the Cluny 
Museum. This figure alone would fix the spot, but, in 
addition, the picture gives a view of old Paris that could 
be seen only from this point of view. This elegant iso- 
lated tower — all that is left of a church dating from 
the beginnings of Christian construction, and destroyed 
during the Revolution — was itself erected late in the 
fifteenth and early in the sixteenth century, and shows 
the last effort of mediaeval Gothic in Paris. It is now 
used as a weather observatory, Pascal's statue, by 
Cavelier, has been placed under the great vaulted arch 
that forms its base, and all about, in the little park, 
are instruments for taking and recording all sorts of 
atmospheric changes. 

It may have been while driving between this tower 
and his sister's house, that Pascal's carriage w^as over- 
turned on Pont-Neuf , and he narrowly escaped death by 
falling or by drowning. From that day he gave up his 
service to science, and gave himself up solely to the ser- 
vice of God. Into his " Thoughts " he put all his depth 



g8 THE STONES OF PARIS 

of reflection and his intensity of feeling, all his force and 
finish of phrase. Yet, always behind this Christian 
philosopher, we are conscious of the man of feeling, 
who owns that he could be drawn down from his high 
meditations, and could be drawn up from his profound 
melancholy, by '" iin peu de bon temps, un bon mot, une 
louange, une caresse/' 

His body was laid in the Abbey Church of Sainte- 
Genevieve, and was removed, on the destruction of 
that edifice in 1807, to its successor in tradition and sen- 
timent, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. It rests at the base of 
one of the outer pillars of the Lady Chapel, opposite the 
spot of Racine's final sepulture. The two tablets from 
their original tombs have been set in the pillars of the 
first chapel on the southern side of the choir, just behind 
the exquisite rood-screen. 

When aged Rue Rollin was quite young it was chris- 
tened Rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne, and it was bordered 
by cottages standing in their own gardens, looking 
down the slope across the town to the river, this being 
the highest street on the hill-side. Its length has been 
lessened by Rue Monge, and that portion left to the east 
of the new street is now Rue de Navarre. Rue Monge 
was cut through the crest of the hill, so that one must 
mount by stone steps to_the old level of the western end 
of Rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne, named anew in honor of 
the scholar and historian, who has given his name also 
to the great college, since removed from this quarter 
to Boulevard Rochechouart, away off on the northern 
heights. Charles Rollin was an earnest student, an un- 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER gg 



usually youthful Rector of the University, and principal 
of the College of Beauvais in 1696, and a writer of his- 
tory and belles-lettres of great charm but little weight. 
He was, withal, an honest soul, somewhat naive, of 
simple tastes and of quiet life. So he came to this se- 
cluded quarter, when a little over seventy, and here he 
died in 1741. His cottage is numbered 8 in the street, 
and is occupied by the school of Sainte-Genevieve, 
whose demure maidens do no violence to his tranquil 
garden in which they stroll. For their use a small 
pavilion has been built in the rear of the garden, but 
there is no other change. The two Latin lines, in- 
scribed by him in praise of his rural home within the 
town, remain on an inner wall of his cottage at your 
left as you enter. 

Fifty years later another writer found a quiet home in 
this same street. Hidden behind the heavy outer door 
of No. 4, a roomy mansion built in 1623 by a country- 
loving subject of Louis XHL, is a tablet that tells 
of the residence here, from 1781 to 1786, of Jacques- 
Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. A man of finer qual- 
ities and subtler charm than RoUin, his work is of no 
greater weight in our modern eyes, for with all the re- 
finement of imagination and the charm of description 
that made his pen '* a magic wand " to Sainte-Beuve, 
his emotional optimism grows monotonous, and his 
exuberant sensibility flows over into sentimentality. 
In the court of his house is an ancient well, and behind 
lies a lovable little garden, with a rare iron rail and gate- 
way. This traveller in many lands, this adorer of 



LOFC. 



loo THE STONES OF PARIS 

nature, took keen delight in his outlook, from his third- 
story windows, over this garden and the gardens be- 
yond, to the Seine. Here in 1784 he wrote *' Studies 
from Nature," an instantaneous success, surpassed only 
by the success of '' Paul and Virginia," published in 
1786. Possibly no book has ever had such a vogue. 
It was after reading this work, in Italy, that the 
young Bonaparte wrote to Bernardin : '' Your pen is 
a painter's brush." Yet his reading of the manu- 
script, before its publication, in the salon of Madame 
Necker, had merely bored his hearers, and the humili- 
ated author had fled from their yawns to this con- 
genial solitude. 

The narrow street has suffered slight change since 
those days, or since those earlier days, when Rene 
Descartes found a temporary home, probably on the 
site of present No. 14, a house built since his day 
here. That was between 1613, when he first came 
from Brittany, and 1617, when he went to the Neth- 
erlands. But there can be found no trace of the stay 
in this street, nor of the secluded home in the Fau- 
bourg Saint-Germain, of the founder of Cartesian 
philosophy — the first movement in the direction of 
modern philosophy — the father of modern physiology, 
as Huxley claims, and of modern psychology, as its 
students allow. His wandering life, in search always 
of truth, ended in 1650, at the court of Christina of 
Sweden. His body was brought back to France by 
the ambassador of Louis XIV., and placed in the old 
Church of Sainte-Genevieve. In 1793, the Conven- 




Rene Descartes. 

(From the portrait by Franz Hals, in the Musee du Louvre.) 



{From a carbon print by Braun, Clement &> Co.] 



THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER loi 

tion decreed its removal to the recently completed and 
secularized Pantheon, and from there it was carried 
for safe keeping, along with so many others, to the 
Museum of French Monuments. In 1819 it found 
final resting-place in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in the 
third chapel on the southern side of the choir. The 
man himself lives for us on the wonderful canvas of 
Franz Hals in the gallery of the Louvre. 

The Paris of the north bank has its slope, that looks 
across the Seine to this southern slope, and that has 
come to be its Scholarly Quarter. The high land away 
behind the lowlands stretching along the northern bank 
was taken early by the Romans for their villas, and 
then by nobles for their chateaux, and then by the hour- 
geoisie for their cottages. As la Ville grew, its citizens 
gave all their thought to honest industry and to the hon- 
est struggle for personal and municipal rights, so that 
none was left for literature. When its time came, the 
town had spread up and over these northern heights, 
and men of letters and of the arts were attracted by 
their open spaces and ample outlook. So large a col- 
ony of these workers had settled there, early in the 
nineteenth century, that some among them gave to 
their hill-side the name of "" la Nouvelle Athenes/' Its 
vogue has gone on growing, and it is crowded with 
the memories of dead pen-workers, and with the pres- 
ence of living pen-workers. So, too, are the suburbs 
toward the west, and this Scholars' Quarter on the 
southern bank, which is barely touched on in this 
book, given so greatly as it is to history, archaeology. 



102 THE STONES OF PARIS 



architecture, and other arts. All this wide-spread dis- 
trict awaits the diligent pen that has given us " The 
Literary Landmarks of London," to give us, as com- 
pletely and accurately, "The Literary Landmarks of 
Paris." 






MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 

In the early years of the seventeenth century there 
stood a low, wide, timbered house on the eastern cor- 
ner of Rues Saint-Honore and des Vieilles-Etuves. To 
the dwellers in that crowded quarter of the Halles it 
was known as '' la Mais on des Singes/' because of the 
carved wooden tree on its angle, in the branches of 
which wooden monkeys shook down wooden fruit to 
an old wooden monkey at its foot. This house, that 
dated from the thirteenth century surely, and that may 
have been a part of Queen Blanche's Paris, was torn 
down only in 1800, and a slice of its site has been cut 
off by Rue Sauval, the widened and renamed Rue des 
Vieilles-Etuves. The modern building on that corner, 
numbered 92 Rue Saint-Honore, is so narrow as to 
have only one window on each of its three floors fac- 
ing that street. Around the first story, above the 
butcher's shop on the entrance floor, runs a balcony 
with great gilt letters on its rail, that read " Maison de 
Moliere." High up on its front wall is a small tablet, 
whose legend, deciphered with difficulty from the 
street, claims this spot for the birthplace of Moliere. 
This is a veracious record. The exact date of the 
birth of the eldest son of Jacques Poquelin and Maris 

105 



io6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Cresse, his wife, is unknown, but it was presumably 
very early in January, 1622, for, on the fifteenth of 
that month, the baby was baptized " Jean Poquelin," 
in his father's parish church of Saint-Eustache — 
a new church not quite completed then. The name 
" Baptiste " was, seemingly, added a little later by his 
parents. 

On this corner the boy lived for eleven years ; here 
his mother died, ten years after his birth, and here 
his father soon married again; and removed, in 1633, to 
a house he had inherited, the ground floor of which he 
made his shop of upholstery and of similar stuffs, the 
family residing above. It was No. 3 Rue de la Ton- 
nellerie, under the pillars of the Halles, possibly, but 
not certainly, on the site of the present No. 31 Rue du 
Pont-Neuf. In a niche, cut in the front wall of this 
modern building, has been placed a bust of Moliere 
and an inscription asserting that this was his birth- 
spot, a local legend that harms no one, and comforts at 
least the locataire. 

Hereabout, certainly, the boy played, running for- 
ward and back across the market. On its northern 
side, near the public pillory, was another house owned 
by his father, on the old corner of Rue de la Reale, 
and its site is now covered by the pavement of modern 
Rue Rambuteau. It is pleasant to picture the lad in 
this ancient quarter, as we walk through those few of 
its streets unchanged to this day, notably that bit of 
Rue de la Ferronerie, so narrow that it blocked the 
carriage of Henri IV., a few years before, and brought 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 107 

him within easy reach of the knife of Ravaillac as he 
sprang on the wheel. 

Frangois Coppee, not yet an old man, readily re- 
calls the square squat columns of the old Halles, and, 
all about, the solid houses supported by pillars like 
the arcades of Place des Vosges; all just as when 
young Poquelin played about them. Plays, as well as 
play, already attracted him; he loved to look at the 
marionettes and the queer side-shows of the outdoor 
fairs held about the Halles; and his grandfather, 
Louis Cresse, an ardent playgoer, often took him to 
laugh at the funny fellows who frolicked on the tres- 
tles of the Pont-Neuf, and at the rollicking farces in 
the Theatre du Marais. No doubt he saw, too, the 
tragedies of the theatre of the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
and this observant boy may well have anticipated the 
younger Crebillon's opinion, that French tragedy of 
that day was the most absolute farce yet invented by 
the human mind. For this was a little while before 
the coming of Corneille with true tragedy. 

This son of the King's upholsterer cared nothing 
for his father's trade, and not much for books. He 
learned, early, that his eyes were meant for seeing, 
and he not only saw everything, but he remembered 
and reflected ; showing signs already of that bent which 
gave warrant, in later life, for Boileau's epithet, 
" Moliere the Contemplator." 

He was sent, in 1636, being then fourteen years old, 
to the College de Clermont, named a little later, and 
still named, Lycee Louis-le-Grand. Rebuilt during 



io8 7 HE STONES OF PARIS 

the Second Empire, it stands on its old site behind the 
College de France, in widened Rue Saint-Jacques. 
Here, during his course of five years, he was suffi- 
ciently diligent in such studies as happened to please 
him ; and was prominent in the plays, acted by the 
scholars at each prize-giving. He made many friend- 
ships with boys who became famous men ; wnth one, 
just leaving school as he came, who especially stood 
his friend in after life — the youthful Prince de Conti, 
younger brother of the great Conde. And this elder 
brother became, years after, the friend and protector 
of the young actor-playwright, just as he was of some 
others of that famous group, Racine, La Fontaine, 
Boileau. All these, along with all men eminent in any 
way, were welcomed to his grand seat at Chantilly, and 
were frequent guests at his great town-house, whose 
salon was a rival to that of the Hotel de Rambouillet. 
His mansion, with its grounds, occupied the whole of 
that triangular space bounded now by Rues de Vau- 
girard, de Conde, and Monsieur-le-Prince. At the 
northern point of that triangle, nearly on the ground 
now covered by the Second Theatre Fran^ais, the 
Odeon, stood the prince's private theatre; wherein 
Moliere, by invitation, played the roles of author, 
actor, manager. Moliere's customary role in this great 
house was that of friend of the host, who wrote to 
him : " Come to me at any hour you please ; you have 
but to announce your name ; your visit can never be 
ill-timed." 

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin betook himself early to the 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 109 



boards for which he was born, from which he could 
not be kept by his course at college or at law. He 
studied law fitfully for a while ; sufficiently, withal, to 
lay up a stock of legal technicalities and procedure, 
which he employed with precision in many of his 
plays. So, too, he took in, no doubt unconsciously, 
details of his father's business ; and his references, in 
his stage-talk, to hangings, furniture, and costumes, 
are frequent and exact. 

The father, unable to journey with the King to Nar- 
bonne in the spring of 1642, as his official duties de- 
manded, had his son appointed to the place, and the 
young man, accompanying the court and playing ta- 
pissier on this journey, saw, it is said, the execution 
of Cinq-Mars and de Thou. In the provinces at this 
time, or it may have been in Paris earlier, he met, 
became intimate with, and soon after joined, a troupe 
of strolhng players, made up of Joseph Bejart, his 
two sisters Madeleine and Genevieve, and other young 
Parisians. 

This troupe was touring in Languedoc early in 1642, 
and was rather strong in its talent and fortunate in 
its takings ; in no way akin to that shabby set of barn- 
stormers satirized by Scarron in his " Roman Comique." 
We cannot fix the date of Poquelin's debut in the com- 
pany, but we know that— with the unhallowed ambi- 
tion of the born and predestined comedian— he began 
in tragedy, and that he was greeted by his rural audi- 
ences with hootings, punctuated by the pelting of fried 
potatoes, then sold at the theatre door. And we know 



no THE STONES OF PARIS 

that the troupe came north to Rouen in the autumn of 
1643, playii^g ^ night or two in the natal town of Cor- 
neille. It is a plausible and a pleasing fancy that sees 
the glory of French dramatic art of that day, at home 
on a visit to his mother, receiving free tickets for the 
show, with the respects of the young recruit to the 
stage, the glory of French dramatic art at no distant 
day. The troupe had gone to Rouen and to other pro- 
vincial towns only while awaiting the construction of 
their theatre in the capital, contracted for during the 
summer. At last, on the evening of December 31, 
1643, it raised its first curtain to the Parisian public, 
under the brave, or the bumptious, title of " ITllustre 
Theatre." 

To trace, from his first step on Paris boards, the 
successive sites of Moliere's theatres is a delightful 
task, in natural continuation of that begun in an earlier 
chapter, where those theatres in existence before his 
time were pointed out. In England, we know, stage- 
players were '* strollers and vagabonds " by statute ; 
not allowed to play within London's walls. All their 
early theatres were outside the City limits. The Globe, 
the summer theatre of Shakespeare and his '' fel- 
lows " — '' whereon was prepared scaffolds for behold- 
ers to stand upon " — was across the Thames, on Bank- 
side, Southwark. So, too, were the Hope, the Rose, 
the Swan. The Curtain was in Shoreditch, Davenant's 
theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the Blackfriars 
theatre on Ludgate Hill, just without the old wall. 

The early playhouses of Paris were built — but for 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS m 



another reason — on the outer side of the town wall of 
Philippe-Auguste, and their seemingly unaccountable 
situations are easily accounted for by following on 
either bank the course of that wall, already plainly 
mapped out in preceding pages. 

This magnificent wall of a magnificent monarch had 
lost much of its old significance for defence with the 
coming of gunpowder, and a new use was found for 
it, in gentler games than war, as the town outgrew its 
encircling limits. In the Middle Ages, tennis — the 
oldest ball-game known — was a favorite sport of kings 
and of those about them. It was called le jeu de paume, 
being played with the hand until the invention of the 
racket; the players standing in the ditch outside the 
wall, against which the ball was thrown. Beyond the 
ditch was built the court for onlookers, the common 
folk standing on its floor, their betters seated in the 
gallery. When the game lost its vogue, these courts 
were easily and cheaply turned into the rude theatres 
of that day, with abundant space for actors and spec- 
tators; those of low degree crowding on foot in th€ 
body of the building, those who paid a little more 
seated in the galleries, those of high degree on stools 
and benches at the side of the stage, and even on the 
stage itself. This encroachment on the stage, within 
sight of the audience, grew to such an abuse that it 
was done .away with in 1759, and the scene was left 
solely to the players. 

Where a tablet is let into the wall of the present 
Nos. 12 and 14 Rue Mazarine, then named the Fosse- 



112 THE STONES OF PARIS 



de-Nesle — the ancient outer ditch of the old wall — 
a roomy playhouse had been contrived from a former 
tennis-court owned by Arnold Mestayer, a solid citi- 
zen of the town, captain of the Hundred Musketeers 
of Henri IV.'s day. This was the theatre taken by the 
Bejart troupe and named " I'lllustre Theatre." Here 
young Poquelin made his first bow to Paris. The 
building stood on the sites of the present Nos. lo, 12, 
and 14 Rue Mazarine, its only entrance for spectators 
reached by an alley that ran along the line between 
Nos. 14 and 16, and so through to Rue de Seine, to 
where the buildings extended over the ground now 
covered by Nos. 11 and 13. These latter houses are 
claimed by local legend for Moliere's residence, and it 
may well be that the rear part of the theatre served as 
sleeping-quarters for the troupe. The interior of No. 
II is of very ancient construction, its front being of 
later date. In the wall between it and No. 9 — a low 
wooden structure, possibly a portion of the original 
fabric — is hidden the well that served first the tennis- 
players and then the stage-players. There is no longer 
any communication between these houses in Rue de 
Seine and those in Rue Mazarine. These latter were 
built in 1830, when the street was widened, that por- 
tion of the old theatre having been demolished a few 
years earlier. 

It was in June, 1644, that the name MiDliere first 
appears, signed — it is his earliest signature in ex- 
istence — among the rest of the company, to a con- 
tract with a dancing man for the theatre. How he 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 



113 



came to select this name is not known, nor was it 
known to any of his young comrades ; for he always 
refused to give his reasons. What is known, is that 
it was a name of weight even then, proving that, with- 
in the first six months of the theatre's existence, his 
business ability had made him its controlling spirit. 
But his abilities as manager and as actor could not 
bring success to the theatre. Foreign and civil wars 
made the State poor; wide-spread financial troubles 
made the people poor; that cruelly cold winter froze 
out the public. " Niil animal vivant nentra dans notre 
salle/' are the bitterly true words, put into the mouth 
of the young actor-manager, by an unknown writer of 
a scurrilous verse. 

He and the troupe were liberated from their lease 
within the year, and, early in 1645, they migrated over 
the river to the Jeti de Paume de la Croix-Noire. On 
either end of the long, low building at No. 32 Quai des 
Celestins is a tablet; the western one showing where 
stood the Tour Barbeau that ended the wall on this 
river-bank; that at the eastern end marking the site 
of this theatre, just without the wall It had an en- 
trance on the quay-front for the boatmen and other 
water-side patrons, another in Rue des Barres for its 
patrons coming by coach. Moliere lodged in the house 
— probably a portion of the theatre — at the corner of 
the quay and of Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul — that 
country lane wherein had died Rabelais, nearly a cen- 
tury earlier. Little Rue des Barres, already seen tak- 
ing its name from the barred or striped gowns of the 



114 



THE STONES OF PARIS 




i%mmi 




stage Door of Moliere's Second Theatre in Paris. 



monks who settled there, is now Rue de I'Ave-Maria, 
and at its number 15 you will find the stage entrance 
of this theatre, hardly changed since it was first trodden 
by the players from over the river. There is the low 
and narrow door, one of its jambs bent with the 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 115 

weight of the more modern structure above, and be- 
yond is the short alleyway, equally narrow, by which 
they passed to the stage. At its inner end, where it 
opens into a small court, is the stone rim of a well, half 
hidden in the wall. It is the well provided in each 
tennis-court for the players, and handed on, with the 
court itself, for the use of the actors. Moliere has 
leaned over this well-curb to wash away his rouge 
and wrinkles. It is an indisputable and attractive wit- 
ness of his early days. In Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, 
where he knelt at the altar for his marriage and stood 
at the font with his son; in Saint-Eustache, where he 
carried his second son for baptism; in Saint-Roch, 
where he wrote his name as godfather of a friend's 
daughter — within these vast and dim aisles, his bodily 
presence is vaguely shadowed forth; here we can 
touch the man. 

What sort of plays were presented at this house we 
do not know, the only record that remains referring 
to the production of " Artaxerxes " by one Mignon. 
Whatever they played, neither the rough men of the 
quay and of Port Saint-Paul, nor the bourgeoisie of 
the Marais, nor the fine folk of Place Royale, crowded 
into the new theatre. 

During this disastrous season, the troupe received 
royal commands to play at Fontainebleau before the 
King and court, and later, by invitation of the Due de 
I'Eperon, at his splendid mansion in Rue de la Pla- 
triere — that mansion in which lived and died La Fon- 
taine, half a century later. Neither these fashionable 



ri6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

flights, nor the royal and noble patronage accorded to 
the troupe, could save it from failure and final bank- 
ruptcy. Moliere, the responsible manager, was ar- 
rested for the theatre's poor little debt for candles and 
lights. He was locked up for a night or two in the 
dismal prison of the Grand Chatelet, once the fortress 
of Louis '' le Gros," torn down only in 1802, on whose 
site now sparkles the fountain of Place du Chatelet. 
From this lock-up, having petitioned for release to M. 
d'Aubray, Civil Lieutenant of the town and father of 
the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Moliere was released by 
the quickly tendered purse of Leonard Aubry, '' Royal 
Paver and Street Sweeper," who, when filling in the 
Fosse-de-Nesle and laying out over it the present Rue 
Mazarine a year before, had made fast friends with 
the young actor. " For his good service in ransom- 
ing the said Poquelin," the entire troupe bound itself 
to make Aubry whole for his debt. 

Now they cross the river again to their former Fau- 
bourg Saint-Germain, taking for their house the Jeu 
de Paume de la Croix-Blanche, outside the wall on 
the south side of the present Rue de Buci, between 
the carrefour at its eastern end and Rue Gregoire-de- 
Tours. Here they played, still playing against dis- 
aster, from the end of 1645 to the end of 1646, and 
then they fled from Paris, fairly beaten, and betook 
themselves to the southern provinces. We cannot 
follow their wanderings, nor record their ups and 
downs, during the twelve years of their absence. In 
the old play-bills we find the names of Be j art aine and 



MO LI ERE AND HIS ERIENDS nf 



of his brother Louis, of their sisters Madeleine and 
Genevieve. Toward the end of their touring they 
added to the family, though not to the boards, Ar- 
mande, who had been brought up in Languedoc, and 
who was claimed by them to be their very young sis- 
ter, and by others to be the unacknowledged daughter 
of Madeleine. 

Moliere, the leader and manager of the troupe from 
the day they started, was then only twenty-five years 
of age, not yet owning or knowing his full powers. 
These he gained during that twelve years' hard school- 
ing and rude apprenticeship, so that he came back to 
the capital, in 1658, master of his craft, with a load of 
literary luggage such as no French tourist has carried, 
before or since. 

Under princely patronage, won in the provinces, his 
troupe appeared before Louis XIV., the Queen-Mother, 
and the entire court, on October 24, 1658, in a theatre 
improvised in the Salle des Gardes of th^' old Louvre, 
now known as the Salle des Caryatides. The pieces 
on that opening night were Corneille's " Nicomede " 
and the manager's " Le Docteur Amoureux." In No- 
vember, the "troupe de Monsieur "—thsit title per- 
mitted by the King's brother— was given possession 
of the theatre in the palace of the Petit-Bourbon. It 
stood between the old Louvre, with which it was con- 
nected by a long gallery, and the Church of Saint- 
Germain-l'Auxerrois, and was torn down in 1660 to 
make place for the new colonnade that forms the pres- 
ent eastern face of the Louvre. The dainty Jardin de 



ri8 THE STONES OF PARIS 

rinfante covers the site of the stage, just at the corner 
of the Egyptian Gallery. 

In this hall Moliere's company played for two years, 
on alternate nights with the Italian comedians, pre- 
senting, along with old standard French pieces — for 
authors in vogue held aloof — his provincial successes, 
as well as new plays and ballets invented by him for 
the delectation of the Grand Monarque. From this 
time his remaining fifteen years of life were filled with 
work; his brain and his pen were relentlessly em- 
ployed ; honor and honors and wealth came plentifully 
to him, happiness hardly at all. 

While at this theatre Moliere lived just around the 
corner on Quai de I'Ecole, now Quai du Louvre, in 
a house that was torn away in 1854 for the widening 
of present Rue du Louvre. Many of the buildings 
left on the quay are of the date and appearance of this, 
his last bachelor home. 

Driven from the Petit-Bourbon by its hurried demo- 
lition in 1660, Moliere was granted the use and the 
privileges of the Salle of the former Palais-Cardinal, 
partly gone to ruin and needing large expenditure to 
make it good. It had been arranged by Richelieu, 
just before his death, for the presentation of his 
*' Mirame." For the great cardinal and great minister 
thought that he was a great dramatist too, and in his 
vanity saw himself the centre of the mimic stage, as 
he really was of the world-stage he managed. He is 
made by Bulwer to say, with historic truth : " Of my 
ministry I am not vain; but of my muse, I own it." 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS iig 

His theatre in his residence — willed at his death to 
the King, and thenceforward known as the Palais- 
Royal — was therefore the only structure in Paris de- 
signed especially and solely for playhouse purposes. 
It stood on the western corner of Rues Saint-Honore 
and de Valois, as a tablet there tells us. During the 
repairs Moliere took his troupe to various chateaux 
about Paris, returning to open this theatre on January 
20, 1 66 1. This removal was the last he made, and 
this house was the scene of his most striking successes. 

It is not out of place here to follow his troupe for 
a while after his death, and so complete our record of 
those early theatres. His widow, succeeding to the 
control of the company, was, within three months, 
compelled to give up the Cardinal's house to Lulli, 
the most popular musician of that day, and a scheming 
fellow withal. The unscrupulous Florentine induced 
the King to grant him this Salle des Spectacles for 
the production of his music. The opera held the house 
until fire destroyed it in 1763, when a new " Academy 
of Music" was constructed on the eastern corner of 
the same streets; this, also, was burned in 1781. 
Above the tablet recording these dates on this eastern- 
corner wall is a fine old sun-dial, such as is rarely seen 
in Paris, and seldom noticed now. 

The widow Moliere, being dispossessed, found a 
theatre in Rue Mazarine, just beyond her husband's 
first theatre, " in the Tennis-Court where hangs a Bot- 
tle for a Sign." For it had been the Jen de Paume de 
la Bouteille, and now became the Theatre Guenegaud, 



120 THE STONES OF PARIS 

being exactly opposite the end of that street. Within 
the structure at No. 42 Rue Mazarine may be seen the 
heavy beams of the front portion of its fabric, where 
was the entrance for the pubHc. The space behind, 
now used for a workshop, with huge pillars around 
its four sides, served for the audience, and the stage 
was built farther beyond. On the court of this house, 
and on the contiguous court of No. 43 Rue de Seine, 
stood a large building, whose first floor was taken by 
Madame Moliere, and in its rear wall she cut a door 
to give access to her stage. The entrance for the 
performers was in the little Passage du Pont-Neuf, 
and under it there are remains of the foundations of the 
theatre. Here, in May, 1677, the widow took the name 
of Madame Guerin on her marriage with a comedian 
of her company. And we feel as little regret as she 
seems to have felt for her loss of an illustrious name. 
In the words of a derisive verse of the time : 

"-£"//<? avoit un mari d^ esprit, quelle aUnoit pen ; 
Elle prend un de chair, qu'elle aime davantage" 

This was the first theatre to present to the general 
public " lyric dramas set to music," brought first to 
France by Mazarin for his private stage in the small 
hall of the Palais-Royal, where they were presented 
as " Comedies en Musique, avec machines a la mode 
d'ltalie." They bored everybody, the fashion for 
opera not yet being set. On October 21, 1680, by 
letters-patent from royalty, the troupe of the Theatre 
Guenegaud was united to that of the Hotel de Bour- 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 121 

gogne, and to the combined companies was granted 
the name of Comedie FranQaise, the first assump- 
tion of that now time-honored title. The theatre be- 
came so successful that the Jansenists in the College 
Mazarin — the present Institute — made an uproar be- 
cause they were annoyed by the traffic and the turmoil 
in the narrow street, and succeeded in driving away 
the playhouse in 1688. After 
a long search, the Comedie 
Fran^aise found new quarters 
in the Jen de Paume de 
VEtoile, built along the outer 
edge of the street made over 
the ditch of the wall, named 
Rue des Fosses-Saint-Ger- 
main, now Rue de I'Ancienne- 
Comedie. At its present No. 14, set in the original 
front wall of the theatre, between the second and third 
stories, a tablet marks the site ; above it is a bas-relief, 
showing a Minerva reclining on a slab. She traces on 
paper, with her right hand, that which is reflected in 
the mirror of Truth, held in her left hand. At the 
rear of the court stands the old fabric that held the 
stage. Since those boards were removed tO' other 
walls — the story shall be told in a later chapter — the 
building has had various usages. It now serves as a 
storehouse for wall-paper. During the Empire it was 
taken for his studio by the artist Antoine-Jean Gros, 
the successor of David and the forerunner of Geri- 
cault; so standing for the transition from the Classic 




122 THE STONES OF PARIS 

to the Romantic school. It is not true that he killed 
himself in this studio. He went out from it, when 
maddened by the art critics, and drowned himself in 
the Seine in the summer of 1835. 

It was a great bill with which the Comedie Fran- 
caise opened this house on the night of April 18, 1689, 
for it was made up of two masterpieces, Racine's 
" Phedre " and Moliere's '' Le Medecin Malgre Lui." 
A vast and enthusiastic audience thronged, with joy- 
ous clatter, through narrow Rues Mazarine and Dau- 
phine, coming from the river. The Cafe Procope, re- 
cently opened just opposite the theatre, was crowded 
after the performance, the drinkers of coffee not quite 
sure that they liked the new beverage. And so, at 
the top of their triumphs, we leave the players with 
whom we have vagabondized so long and so sympa- 
thetically. 

Moliere, at the height of his career, had married 
Armande Be j art, he being forty years of age, she 
" aged twenty years or thereabout," in the words of 
the marriage contract, signed January 23, 1662. No 
one knows now, very few knew then, whether the bride 
was the sister or the daughter of Madeleine Bejart, 
Moliere's friend and comrade for many years, who 
doubled her role of versatile actress with that of provi- 
dent cashier of the company. She was devoted to 
Armande, whom she had taken to her home from the 
girl's early schooling in Languedoc, and over whom 
she watched in the coulisses. She fought against the 
marriage, which she saw was a mistake, finally ac- 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 123 



cepted it, and at her own death in 1672 left all her 
handsome savings to the wife of Moliere. 

In the cast of the " Ecole des Maris," first produced 
in 1 66 1, appears the name of Armande Be j art, and, 
three months after the marriage, *' Mile. Moliere "— 
so were known the wives of the bourgeoisie, *' Ma- 
dame " being reserved for gr and es- dames — played the 
small part of Elise put for her by the author into his 
"Critique de I'Ecole des Femmes." Henceforward 
she was registered as one of the troupe, the manager 
receiving two portions of the receipts for his and her 
united shares. She was a pleasing actress, never more 
than mediocre, except in those parts, in his own plays, 
fitted to her and drilled into her by her husband. She 
had an attractive presence on the boards, without much 
beauty, without any brains. Her voice was exquisite, 
opulent in tones that seemed to suggest the heart she 
did not own. For she was born with an endowment 
of adroit coquetry, and she developed her gift. She 
was flighty and frivolous, evasive and obstinate, fond 
of pleasures not always innocent. Her spendthrift 
ways hurt Moliere's thrifty spirit, her coquetry hurt 
his love, her caprices hurt his honor. His infatuation, 
a madness closely allied to his genius, brought to him 
a fleeting happiness, followed by almost unbroken tor- 
ments of love, jealousy, forgiveness. In his home he 
found none of the rest nor comfort nor sympathy so 
much needed, after his prodigious work in composing, 
drill-work in rehearsing, and public work in perform- 
ing at his theatre, and at Versailles and Fontainebleau. 



124 THE STONES OF PARIS 

He got no consolation from his wife for the sneers of 
venomous rivals, enraged by his supremacy, and for 
the stabs of the great world, eager to avenge his keen 
puncturing of its pretence and its priggishness. And 
while he writhed in private, he made fun in public of 
his immitigable grief, and portrayed on the stage the 
betrayed and bamboozled husband — at once tragic and 
absurd — that he believed himself to be. These eleven 
years of home-sorrows shortened his life. On the 
very day of his fatal attack, he said to the flippant 
minx, Armande : '' I could believe myself happy when 
pleasure and pain equally filled my life; but, to-day, 
broken with grief, unable to count on one moment of 
brightness or of ease, I must give up the game. I 
can hold out no longer against the distress and despair 
that leave me not one instant of respite." 

The church ceremony of their marriage had taken 
place on February 20, 1662, at Saint-Germain-l'Aux- 
errois, as its register testifies. He had already left 
his bachelor quarters on Quai de I'Ecole, and had 
taken an apartment in a large house situated on the 
small open space opposite the entrance of the Palais- 
Royal, the germ of the present place of that name. 
His windows looked out toward his theatre, and on 
the two streets at whose junction the house stood 
— Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre and Saint-Honore. The 
first-named street, near its end on Quai du Louvre, 
held the Hotel de Rambouillet, which was a recon- 
struction of the old Hotel de Pisani, made in 1618, after 
the plan and under the eye of the Marquise de Ram- 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 125 

bouillet. She is known in history, as she was known 
in the salons of her day, by her sobriquet of " Arthe- 
nice " — an anagram coined by Malherbe from her 
name Catherine. Hither came all that was brilliant in 
Paris, and much that pretended to be brilliant; and 
from here went out the grotesque affectations of the 
Precieiises Ridicules. The mansion — one of the grand- 
est of that period — having passed into other hands, 
was used as a Vauxhall d'Hiver in 1784, as a theatre 
in 1792, and was partly burned in 1836. The remain- 
ing portion, which served as stables for Louis-Philippe, 
was wiped away, along with all that end of the old 
street, by the Second Empire, to make space for the 
alignment of the wings of the Louvre. The buildings 
of the Ministry of Finance cover a portion of the 
street, and the site of Moliere's residence, in the mid- 
dle of the present Place du Palais-Royal, is trodden, 
almost every day of the year, by the feet of American 
women, hurrying to and from the Museum of the 
Louvre or the great shop of the same name. 

After a short stay in their first home, Moliere and 
his wife set up housekeeping in Rue de Richelieu. It 
is not known if it was in the house of his later domi- 
cile and death. Their cook here was the famous La 
Foret, to whom, it is said, Moliere read his new plays, 
trying their effect on the ordinary auditor, such as 
made up the bulk of the audiences of that time. Ser- 
vants were commonly called La Foret then, and the 
real name of this cook was Renee Vannier. Within a 
year, domestic dissensions came to abide in the house- 



126 THE STONES OF PARIS 

hold, and it was moved back to its first home, where 
Madeleine had remained, and now made one of the 
menage. To it came a new inmate in February, 1664, 
a boy, baptized at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, having 
the great monarch for a godfather, and for a god- 
mother Henrietta of England, wife of the King's 
brother, Philippe d'Orleans, and poisoned by him or 
his creatures a few years later, it is believed. These 
royal sponsors were represented at the christening by 
distinguished State servants, the whole afifair giving 
ample proof of this player's position at the time. 

A little later, we have hints that the small family 
was living farther east in Rue Saint-Honore, at the 
corner of Rue d'Orleans, still near his theatre, in a 
house swept away when that street was widened into 
Rue du Louvre. From this house was buried, in No- 
vember, 1664, the child Louis, the burial-service being 
held at Saint-Eustache, their parish church, Moliere's 
baptismal church, his mother's burial church. Here, 
too, in the following year, August, 1665, he brought 
to the font his newly born daughter, Esprit-Madeleine. 
In October of this same year he took a long lease of 
an apartment in their former house on the corner of 
Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, and there they stayed 
for seven years, removing once more, and for the last 
time, in October, 1672, to Rue de Richelieu. 

Where now stands No. 40 of that street, Rene 
Baudelet, Tailor to the Queen by title, had taken a 
house only recently builded, and from him Moliere 
rented nearly every floor. His lease was for a term 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 127 

of six years, and he lived only four and a half months 
after coming here. The first floor was set apart for 
his wife, whose ostentatious furnishing, including a 
bed fit for a queen, is itemized in the inventory made 
after her husband's death. He took for his apartment 
the whole second floor, spaciously planned and sumpt- 
uously furnished ; for he, too, was lavish in his ex- 
penditure and loved costly surroundings. His plate 
was superb, his wardrobe rich, his collection of dra- 
matic books and manuscripts complete and precious. 
His bedroom, wherein he died, was on the rear of the 
house, and its windows looked over the garden of the 
Palais-Royal, to which he had access from his terrace 
below, and thence by steps down to a gate in the gar- 
den wall. Thus he could get to his theatre by way of 
those trim paths of Richelieu's planning, as well as 
by going along the street and around the corner. You 
must bear in mind that the galleries of the Palais- 
Royal, with their shops, were not constructed until 
1784, and that Rues de Valois and Montpensier were 
not yet cut ; so that the garden reached, on either side, 
to the backs of the houses that fronted on Rues de 
Richelieu and des Bons-Enfants. Many of the occu- 
pants had, like Moliere, their private doors in the 
garden wall, with access by stone steps. One of these 
staircases is still left, and may be seen in Rue de Valois, 
descending from the rear of the Hotel de la Chancel- 
lerie d'Orleans, whose Doric entrance-court is at No. 
19 Rue des Bons-Enfants. 
The house now numbered 40 Rue de Richelieu and 



128 THE STONES OF PARIS 

2i7 Rue Montpensier was erected soon after 1767, when 
the walls that had harbored Moliere were torn down 
to prevent them from tumbling down. The present 
building has an admirable circular staircase cHmbing 
to an open lantern in the roof. The houses on either 
side, numbered 37 his and 35 Rue Montpensier, retain 
their original features of a central body with project- 
ing wings, and so serve to show us a likeness of 
Moliere's dwelling. Their front windows look out now 
on the grand fountain of the younger Visconti's de- 
sign, erected to Moliere's memory in 1844, at the junc- 
tion of Rue de Richelieu and old Rue Traversiere, now 
named Rue Moliere. This fountain, flowing full and 
free always, as flowed the inspiration of his Muse, is 
surmounted by an admirable seated statue of the player- 
poet by Seurre, the figures of Serious and of Light 
Comedy, standing at his feet on either side, being of 
Pradier's design. And in Rue de Richelieu, a little 
farther south, at the present Nos. 23 and 23 his — 
once one grand mansion, still intact, though divided 
— lived his friend Mignard, and here he died in 1795. 
The painter and the player had met at Avignon in 
1657-8, and grew to be life-long friends, with equal 
admiration of the other's art. Indeed, Moliere con- 
sidered that he honored Raphael and Michael Angelo, 
when he named them '' ces Mi guards de leiir age" 
Certainly no such vivid portrait of Moliere has come 
down to us as that on the canvas of this artist, now 
in the gallery at Chantilly. It shows us not the co- 
median, but the man in the maturity of his strength 




The Moli&re Fountain. 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 



129 



and beauty. His blond perruque, such as was worn 
then by all gallants, such as made his Alceste sneer, 
softens the features marked strongly even so early in 
life, but having none of the hard lines cut deeper by 
worry and weariness. The mouth is large and frank, 
the eyes glow with a humorous melancholy, the ex- 
pression is eloquent of his wistful tenderness. 

Early in 1667 we find Moliere leasing a little cot- 
tage, or part of a cottage, at Auteuil, for a retreat at 
times. He needed its pure air for his failing health, 
its quiet for his work, and its distance from the dis- 
quiet of his home with Armande and Madeleine. He 
had laid by money ; and his earnings, with his pension 
from the King — who had permitted to the troupe the 
title of '' His Majesty's Comedians " — gave him a 
handsome income. He was not without shrewdness 
as a man of affairs, and not without tact as a courtier. 
Success, in its worst worldly sense, could come only 
through royal favor in that day, and no man, what- 
ever his manliness, seemed ashamed to stoop to flat- 
ter. Racine, La Fontaine, the sterling Boileau, the 
antiquely upright Corneille, were tarred, thickly or 
thinly, with the same brush. 

Auteuil was then a tranquil village, far away from 
the town's turmoil, and brought near enough for its 
dwellers by the silent and swift river. Now it is a 
bustling suburb of the city, and the site of Moliere's 
cottage and grounds is covered by a block of common- 
place modern dwellings on the corner of Rue Theophile 
Gautier and Rue d'Auteuil, and is marked bv a tablet 



I30 THE STONES OF PARIS 

in the front wall of No. 2 of the latter street. It has 
been claimed that this is a mistaken localization, and 
that it is nearly opposite this spot that we must look 
for his garden and a fragment of his villa, still saved. 
The conscientious pilgrim may not fail to take that 
look, and will ring at the iron gate of No. 57 Rue 
Theophile Gautier. It is the gate of the ancient hotel 
of Choiseul-Praslin, a name of unhappy memory in 
the annals of swell assassins. The ducal wearer of the 
title, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, stabbed his 
wife to death in their town-house in the Champs Ely- 
sees, and poisoned himself in his cell to save his con- 
demnation by his fellow-peers of France. The ancient 
family mansion has been taken by " Les Dominicaines/' 
who have devoted themselves for centuries to the edu- 
cation of young girls, and have placed here the Insti- 
tution of Saint Thomas Aquinas. 

A white-robed sister graciously gives permission to 
enter, and leads the visitor across the spacious court, 
through the stately rooms and halls — all intact in their 
old-fashioned harmony of proportion and decoration 
— into the garden that stretches far along Rue de 
Remusat, and that once spread away down the slope 
to the Seine. Here, amid the magnificent cedar trees, 
centuries old, stands a mutilated pavilion of red brick 
and white stone or stucco, showing only its unbroken 
porch with pillars and a fragment of the fabric, cut 
raggedly away a few feet behind, to make room for a 
new structure. Over the central door are small fig- 
ures in bas-relief, and in the pediment above one reads. 



MO LIE RE AND HIS FRIENDS 131 



" Ici fut la Maison de Moliere." It would be a com- 
fort to be able to accept this legend ; the fact that pre- 
vents is that the pavilion was erected only in 1855 by 
the owner of the garden, to keep alive the associations 
of Moliere with this quarter! 

It is in his garden, behind the wall that holds the 
tablet, that we may see the player-poet as he rests in 
the frequent free hours, and days withal, that came 
in the actor's busy life then. Here he walks, alone or 
with his chosen cronies : Rohault, his sympathetic 
physician; Boileau, a frequent visitor; Chapelle, who 
had a room in the cottage, the quondam schoolfellow 
and the man of rare gifts ; a pleasing minor-poet, fond 
of fun, fonder of wine, friendly even to rudeness, but 
beloved by all the others, whom he teased and ridi- 
culed, and yet counselled shrewdly. He sympathized 
with, albeit his sceptic spirit could not quite fraternize 
with, the sensitive vibrating nature of Moliere, that 
brought, along with acutest enjoyment, the keenest suf- 
fering. In this day-and-night companionship, craving 
consolation for his betossed soul, Moliere gave voice 
to his sorrows, bewailing his wife's frailties and the 
torments they brought to him — to him, " born to ten- 
derness," as he truly put it, but unable to plant any 
root of tenderness in her shallow nature — loving her 
in spite of reason, living with her, but not as her hus- 
band, suffering ceaselessly. 

This garden often saw gayer scenes of good-fellow- 
ship and feasting, and once a historic frolic, when the 
convives, flushed with wine, ran down the slope to the 



132 THE STONES OF PARIS 

river, bent on plunging in to cool their blood, and were 
kept dry and undrowned by Moliere's steadier head 
and hand. His menage was modest, and his wife sel- 
dom came out from their town apartment, but his 
daughter was brought often for a visit from her board- 
ing-school near by in Auteuil. He was beloved by all 
his neighbors, to whom he was known less by his public 
repute than by his constant kindly acts among them. 
It was not the actor-manager, but the " tapissier valet- 
de-chamhre du Roi/' then residing in Auteuil, who 
signed the register of the parish church, as godfather 
of a village boy on March 20, 1671 ; just as he had 
signed, in the same capacity, the register of Saint- 
Roch on September 10, 1669, at the christening of a 
friend's daughter, Jeanne Catherine Toutbel. These 
signatures were destroyed when all the ancient church 
registers, then stored in the Hotel de Ville, were burned 
by the Commune. 

On the night of Friday, February 16, 1673, while 
personating his Malade Imaginaire — its fourth per- 
formance — Moliere was struck down by a genuine 
malady. He pulled through the play, and, as the cur- 
tain went down at last, he was nearly strangled by a 
spasm of coughing that broke a blood-vessel. Careful 
hands carried him around to his bedroom on the sec- 
ond floor of No. 40, where in a few days — too few, 
his years being a little more than fifty — death set him 
free from suffering. 

This fatal crisis was the culmination of a long series 
of recurrent paroxysms, coming from his fevered life 



MO LIE RE AND HIS FRIENDS 133 

and his fiery soul, that " o'er informed the tenement 
of clay," in Dryden's phrase. And his heart had been 
crushed by the death of his second boy, Pierre- Jean- 
Baptiste-Armand, in October of the previous year. 
Then, on the physical side, he had been subjected 
throughout long years to constant exposure to draughts 
on the stage, and to sudden changes within and with- 
out the theatre, most trying to so delicate a frame. 
His watchful friend, Boileau, had often urged him to 
leave the stage before he should break down. More- 
over, it distressed Boileau that the greatest genius of 
his time, as he considered Moliere, should have to 
paint his face, put on a false mustache, get into a 
bag and be beaten with sticks, in his ludicrous role 
of comic valet. But all pleading was thrown away. 
The invalid maintained that nothing but his own man- 
agement, his own plays, and his own playing, kept 
his theatre alive and his company from starvation; 
and so he held on to the end, dying literally in harness. 
His wife appeared too late on the last scene, the priest 
who was summoned could not come in time, and the 
dying eyes were closed by two stranger nuns, lodging 
for the time in the house. 

The arm-chair, in which sat the Malade Imaginaire 
on the last night of his professional life, is treasured 
among the relics of the Theatre Frangais. It is a 
massive piece of oak furniture, with solid square arms 
and legs; the roomy back lets down, and is held at 
any required angle by an iron ratchet; there are iron 
pegs in front for the little shelf, used by the sick man 



134 THE STONES OF PARIS 

for his bottles and books. The brown leather cover- 
ing is time-worn and stitched in spots. It is a most 
attractive relic, this simple piece of stage property. 
Its exact copy as to shape, size, and color is used on 
the boards of the Theatre Fran(;ais in the performances 
of *' Le Malade Imaginaire." And, with equal rever- 
ence, they kept for many years in the ancient village 
of Pezenas, in Languedoc — where the strolling troupe 
wintered in 1655-6, playing in the adjacent hamlets 
and in the chateaux of the seigneurie about — the big 
wooden arm-chair belonging to the barber Gely, and 
almost daily through that winter occupied by Moliere. 
Upon it he was wont to sit, in a corner, contemplating 
all who came and went, making secret notes on the 
tablets he carried always for constant records of the 
human document. It has descended to a gentleman 
in Paris, by whom it is cherished. 

The cure of Saint-Eustache, the parish church, re- 
fused its sacrament for the burial of the author of 
" Tartufe." " To get by prayer a little earth," in Boi- 
leau's words, the widow had to plead with the King; 
and it was only his order that wrung permission from 
the Archbishop of Paris for those " maimed rites " that 
we all know. They were accorded, not to the player, 
but, as the burial register reads, to the '' Tapissier 
valet-de-chamhre du Roi." Carried to his grave by 
night, he was followed by a great concourse of unhired 
mourners, of every rank and condition ; and to the poor 
among them, money was distributed by the widow. 
The grave — in which was placed the French Terence 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 135 

and Plautus in one, to use La Fontaine's happy phrase 
— was dug in that portion of the cemetery of the Chapel 
of Saint-Joseph, belonging to Saint-Eustache, that was 
styled consecrated by the priesthood. This cemetery 
going out of use, the ground, which lay on the right 
of the old road to Montmartre, was given to a market. 
This, in its turn, was cleared away between 1875 and 
1880, and on the site of the cemetery are the buildings 
numbered 142 and 144 Rue Montmartre, 24 and 26 
Rue Saint-Joseph. Over the grave, as she thought, 
the widow erected a great tombstone, under which, tra- 
dition says, Moliere did not lie. Tradition lies, doubt- 
less, and Armande's belated grief and posthumous de- 
votion probably displayed themselves on the right spot. 
The stone was cracked — going to bits soon after — by a 
fire built on it during the terrible winter a few years 
later, when the poor of Paris were warmed by great 
out-of-door fires. The exact spot of sepulture could 
not be fixed in 1792, when the more sober revolution- 
ary sections were anxious to save the remains of their 
really great men from the desecrations of the Patriots, 
to whom no ground was consecrate, nor any memories 
sacred. Then, in the words of the official document, 
*' the bones which seemed to be those of Moliere " were 
exhumed, and carried for safe keeping to the Museum 
of French Monuments begun by Alexandre Lenoir in 
1 79 1, in the Convent of the Petits-Augustins. Its site 
is now mostly covered by the court of the Beaux-Arts 
in Rue Bonaparte. Those same supposed bones of Mo- 
liere were transferred, early in the present century, to 



136 THE STONES OF PARIS 



the Cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, where they now He in 
a stone sarcophagus. By their side rest the supposed 
bones of La Fontaine, removed from the same ground 
• to the same museum at the same time; La Fontaine 
having really been buried, twenty-two years after Mo- 
liere's burial, in the Cemetery of the Innocents, a half- 
mile from that of Saint-Joseph ! 

Our ignorance as to whether these be Moliere's 
bones, under the monument in Pere-Lachaise, is 
matched by our unacquaintance with the facts of his 
life. And we know almost as little of Moliere the man, 
as we know of the man called Shakespeare — the only 
names in the modern drama which can be coupled. We 
have no specimens of the actual manuscript, and few 
specimens of the handwriting, of either. The Comedie 
Frangaise has a priceless signature of Moliere given by 
Dumas His, and there are others, it is believed, on legal 
documents in notaries' offices, but no one knows how to 
get at them. 

His portraiture by pen, too, would have been lost to 
us, but for an old lady who has left a detailed and vivid 
description of " Monsieur Moliere." This Madame 
Poisson was the daughter of Du Croissy, whose name 
appears in the troupe's early play-bills ; and the wife 
of Paul Poisson, also an actor with Moliere, and with 
his widow. Madame Poisson died in 1756, aged nine- 
ty-eight, so that she was an observant and intelligent 
girl of fifteen at the time of Moliere's death. In her 
recollections, written in 1740, she says that he was 
neither stout nor thin ; in stature he was rather tall than 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 137 



short, his carriage noble, his leg very fine, his walk 
measured, his air most serious; the nose large, the 
mouth wide, the lips full, his complexion dark, his eye- 
brows black and heavy, '' and the varied movements he 
gave them " — and, she might have added, his whole 
facial flexibility — " made him master of immense comic 
expression." 

" His air most serious," she says ; it was more than 
that, as is proven by hints of his companions, and shown 
by strokes in the surviving portraits. All these go to 
assure us of his essential melancholy. Not only did 
he carry about with him the traditional dejection of 
the comic actor, but he was by character and by habit 
contemplative — observant of human nature — as well 
as introspective — peering into his own nature. The 
man who does this necessarily grows sad. Moliere's 
sadness was mitigated by a humor of equal depth, a 
conjunction rare in the Latin races, and found at its 
best only in him and in Cervantes. This set him to 
writing and acting farces ; and into them he put senti- 
ment for the first time on the French stage. There is 
a gravity behind his buffoonery, and a secret sympathy 
with his butts. So, when he came to write comedy — 
that hard and merciless exposure of our common hu- 
man nature, turned inside out for scorn — he left place 
for pity in his ridicule, and there is no cruelty in his 
laughter. His wholly sweet spirit could not be soured 
by the injustices and insolences that came into his life. 
If there was a bitter taste in his mouth, his lips were all 
honey. '' Ce rire ainer," marked by Boileau in the 



138 THE STONES OF PARIS 

actor's Alceste, was only his stage assumption for that 
character. The inborn good-heartedness that made his 
comedy gracious and unhostile, made his relations with 
men and women always kindly and generous. You see 
that sympathy with humanity in Mignard's portrait, 
and in the bust in the foyer of the Comedie Fran(;aise, 
made by Houdon from other portraits and from de- 
scriptions. Under the projecting brow of the observer 
are the eyes of the contemplator, shrewd and specu- 
lative, and withal infinitely sorrowful, with the sad- 
ness of the man who knew how to suffer acutely, 
mostly in silence and in patience ; and this is the face 
of the man who made all France laugh! 

Pierre Corneille stands in bronze on the bridge of 
his natal town, Rouen, where he stood in the flesh of his 
twenty-eight years, among other citizens who went to 
welcome Louis XIII. and his ruler, Richelieu, on their 
visit in 1634. The young advocate by profession and 
poet by predilection presented his verses in greeting and 
in honor of the King, and was soon after enrolled one of 
the small and select band of the Cardinal's poets. With 
the Cardinal's commission and a play or two, already 
written when only twenty-three, he made his way to 
Paris. For nearly thirty years, the years of his dra- 
matic triumphs, Corneille lived alternately in Paris and 
in Rouen, until his mother's death, in 1662, left him 
free to make his home in the capital. In that year he 
settled in rooms in the Hotel de Guise, now the Musee 
4es Archives, whose ducal owner was a patron of the 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 139 



Theatre du Marais, close at hand. At his death, in or 
about 1664, Corneille sent in a rhymed petition for 
rooms in the Louvre, where lodging was granted to 
men of letters not too well-to-do. His claim was re- 
fused, and he took an apartment in Rue de Clery during 
that same year. It was a workman's quarter, and none 
of its houses were very grand, but that of Corneille is 
spoken of as one of the better sort, with its own porte- 
cochere. Pierre's younger brother, Thomas, came to 
live in the same house. And from this time on, the two 
brothers were never parted in their lives. They had 
married sisters, and the two families dwelt in quiet hap- 
piness under the common roof. This house in Rue de 
Clery cannot be fixed. It may be one of the poor 
dwellings still standing in that old street, or it may no 
longer exist. It is the house famous in anecdotal his- 
tory for owning the trap-door in the floor between the 
working-rooms of the brothers, which Pierre— at loss 
for an adequate rhyme — would lift up, and call to 
Thomas, writing in his room below, to give him the 
wished-for word. 

This dull street formed the background of a touching 
picture, when, in 1667, Corneille's son was brought 
home, wounded, from the siege of Douai. The straw 
from the litter was scattered about the street as the 
father helped them lift his boy to carry him into the 
house, and Corneille was summoned to the Chatelet, 
for breaking police regulations with regard to the care 
of thoroughfares ; he appeared, pleaded his own cause, 
and was cast in damages ! 



140 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Here in 1671, Corneille and Moliere, in collaboration, 
wrote the " tragedy-ballet ' Psyche ' " ; this work in 
common cementing a friendship already begun between 
the two men, and now made firmer for the two years of 
Moliere's life on from this date. The play was begun 
and finished in a fortnight, to meet the usual urgency of 
the King in his amusements. Moliere planned the 
piece and its spectacular effects, and wrote the pro- 
logue, the first act, and the first scenes of the second 
and third acts ; Corneille's share being the rest of the 
rhymed dialogue and the songs. It was set to music by 
Lulli — " the incomparable Monsieur Lulli," as he was 
called by Moliere — whose generous laudation of the 
musician was not lessened by his estimate of the man. 
For Lulli was not an honest man, and he prospered at 
the expense of his fellows. His magnificent home was 
built by money borrowed from Moliere, whose widow 
was repaid as we have seen. LuUi's hotel is still in per- 
fect condition as to its exterior, at the corner of Rues 
des Petits-Champs and Sainte-Anne. This latter front 
is the finer, with its pilasters and composite capitals, its 
masks carved in the keystones of the low entresol win- 
dows, and the musical instruments placed above the 
middle window of the first grand floor. 

They make a pretty picture, not without a touch of 
the pathetic — and M. Gerome has put it on canvas — as 
they sit side by side, planning and plotting their play : 
Moliere at the top of his career, busy, prosperous, ap- 
plauded ; Corneille past his prime and his popularity, 
beginning to bend with age and to break in spirit. He 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 141 



had, by now, fallen on evil days, which saw him '* sati- 
ated with glory, and famished for money," in his words 
to Boileau. Richelieu may not have done much for 
him, but he had been at least a power in his patronage, 
and his death, in 1642, had left the old poet with no 
friend at court, albeit the new minister, Mazarin, had 
put him on the pension list. His triumphs with " Le 
Cid " and " Les Horaces " had not saved him from — 
nor helped him bear — the dire failures of " Attila " and 
of " Agesilas." Poetry had proved a poor trade, royalty 
had forgotten him, Colbert's economies had left his 
pension in arrears along with many others, and finally, 
after Colbert's death, the new minister, Louvois, had 
suppressed it entirely. Against the earlier default he 
had made patient and whimsical protest in verse ; each 
official year of delay had been officially lengthened to 
fifteen months ; and Corneille's Muse was made to hope 
that each of the King's remaining years of reign might 
be lengthened to an equal limit ! 

The contrast between the two figures — the King of 
French Tragedy shabby in Paris streets, the King of 
French people resplendent at Versailles — is sharply 
drawn by Theophile Gautier in his superb verses, read 
at Corneille's birthday fete at the Comedie Frangaise, 
on June 6, 185 1. Gautier had not been able to find 
any motive for the lines, which he had promised to 
prepare for Arsene Houssaye, the director, until Hugo 
gave him this cue. 

The faithful, generous Boileau — ^the man called 
" stingy," because of his exactness, which yet enabled 



142 THE STONES OF PARIS 

him always to aid others — offered to surrender his own 
well-secured and promptly-paid pension in favor of 
his old friend ; a transfer not allowed by the authorities, 
and the King sent a sum of money, at length, to Cor- 
neille. It came two days before the poet's death, when 
he might have quoted, '' I have no time to spend it ! " 
There is extant a letter from an old Rouen friend of his 
who, visiting Paris in 1679, describes a walk he took 
with Corneille, then aged seventy-three. In Rue de la 
Parcheminerie — that ancient street on the left bank of 
the Seine, which we have already found to be less 
spoiled by modern improvements than are its neigh- 
bors — Corneille sat down on a plank by a cobbler's stall, 
to have one of his worn shoes patched. That cobbler's 
stall, or its direct descendant, may be seen in that street, 
to-day. Corneille counted his coppers and found just 
enough to pay the cobbler's paltry charge ; refusing to 
accept any coin from the proffered purse of his friend, 
who, then and there, wept in pity for such a plight for 
such a man. 

Age and poverty took up their abode with him — as 
well as his more welcome comrade, the constant Thomas 
— in his next dwelling. We cannot be sure when they 
left Rue deClery, and we find them first in Rue d'Argen- 
teuil in November, 1683, the year of Colbert's death. 
That old road from the village of Argenteuil had be- 
come, and still remains, a city street absolutely without 
character or temperament of its own ; it has not the 
merit even of being ignoble. And the Corneille house 
at No. 6, as it was seen just before its destruction, was 







m ^-^... 





* ' 



i} 



^^#*s»»*t«*' 



IP^ 






^ .1-' 






y 



|i '.'-^ ^ ml 



^ <j(Pi«i8wi«J 




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__^.^... 



y^.^//^}/l/)ff//f 



The Door of Corneille's Last Dwelling. 

(From a drawing by Robert Delafontaine, by permission of M. Victorien Sardou.) 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 143 

a gloomy and forbidding building. It had two en- 
trances — as has the grandiose structure now standing 
on its site — one in Rue d'Argenteuil, on which front is 
a tablet marking this historic scene of the poet's death, 
and the other in Rue de I'Eveque. That street was 
wiped out of existence by the cutting of Avenue de 
I'Opera in 1877-8, which necessitated the demolition 
of this dreary old house. Its most attractive relic is 
now in the possession of M. Victorien Sardou, at his 
country house, at Marly-le-Roi, in the porte-cochere, 
with its knocker. Every guest there is proud to put 
his hand on the veritable knocker lifted so often by 
Corneille's hand. 

That hand had lost its fire and force by this time, and 
the poet's last months were wretched enough in these 
vast and desolate rooms on the second floor, so vast and 
desolate that he was unable to keep his poor septua- 
genarian bones warm within them. Here came death 
to him on Sunday, October i, 1684. They buried him 
in his parish church, Saint-Roch, a short step from his 
home ; and on the western pillar within the entrance a 
tablet to his memory was placed in 1821. The church 
was so short a step, that, feeble and forlorn as he was, 
he had found his way there early of mornings during 
these last years. And in his earlier years, when living 
in Rue de Clery, he had often hurried there, drawn by 
the strong and splendid Bossuet, whose abode was 
either in Rue Sainte-Anne hard by, or in the then new 
mansion still standing in Place des Victoires. Here in 
the church, as we stand between Corneille's tablet and 



144 THE STONES OF PARIS 



Bossuet's pulpit, the contrast is brought home to us 
of the two forms of eloquence that most touch men : 
that of this preacher burning with ancient Hebraic 
fire, and that of this dramatist glowing with the white- 
heat of classicism. 

After the burial, the bereft Thomas removed to 
rooms in Cul-de-sac des Jacobins, only a little way 
from his last home with Pierre. This blind alley has 
now been cut through to the market of Saint-Honore, 
and become a short commonplace street, named Saint- 
Hyacinthe. Twenty years the younger of the two, 
Thomas was, during his life, and has been in his after- 
renown, unduly overshadowed by his imperishable 
brother. He had a rare gift of versification, and a 
certain skill in the putting together of plays. Of them 
he constructed a goodly lot, some few of them in col- 
laboration. His '' Timocrate," played for eighty con- 
secutive nights at the Theatre du Marais, was the most 
popular success on the boards of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. His knack in pleasing the public taste was as 
much his own as was his mastery of managers, by 
which he got larger royalties than any playwright of 
his day. He was a competent craftsman, too, in more 
weighty fabrications, and turned out, from his factory, 
translations and dictionaries, which have joined his 
plays in everlasting limbo. 

All the early theatrical productions of Pierre Cor- 
neille were originally put on the stage of the Theatre du 
Marais, which had been started by seceders from the 
theatre of the Hotel de Bourgogne, as has been told in 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 145 



our first chapter. After a temporary lodgment in the 
quarter of the Hotel de Ville, it was soon permanently 
housed in the recast tennis-court of the " Hotel Sale." 
There it remained until 1728, when Le Camus bought 
the place and turned the theatre into stables. Where 
stands modern No. 90 in the widened Rue Vieille-du- 
Temple was the public entrance of the theatre. The 
'' Hotel Sale,'' the work of Lepautre, is still in perfect 
condition behind the houses of Rue Vieille-du-Temple. 
Its principal portal is at Rue Thorigny, 5, with a side 
entrance in Rue Saint-Gervais-des-Coutures. Known 
at first as the Hotel Juigne, it was popularly renamed, 
in the seventeenth century, the "' Hotel Sale,'' because 
its rapacious owner, Aubray de Fontenay, had amassed 
his wealth by farming out the salt tax — that most ex- 
acting and irritating of the many taxes of that time. 

Through a lordly arch in Rue Thorigny, we pass into 
the grand court, and find facing us the dignified fagade, 
its imposing pediment carved with figures and flowers. 
Within is a stately hall, made the more stately by the 
placing at one end of a noble chimney-piece, a copy of 
one at Versailles. In the centre a superb staircase rises, 
wide and easy, through a sculptured cage, to the first 
floor; its old wrought-iron railing is of an exquisite 
pattern ; nothing in all Paris is nearer perfection than 
this staircase, its railing, and its balustrade. In the 
rooms above, kept with reverence by the bronze-maker 
who occupies them, admirable panelling and carvings 
are found. The fa(;ade on the gardens — now shrunk 
from their former spaciousness to a small court — is 



146 THE STONES OF PARIS 

most impressive, with ancient wrought-iron balconies; 
in its pediment, two vigilant dogs watch the hands 
that move no more on the great clock-face between 
them. 

The Theatre du Marais had been established here by 
the famous Turlupin, made immortal in Boileau's verse, 
who, with his two comic confreres — baker's boys, like 
the brothers Coquelin of our day — kept his audiences in 
a roar with his modern French farces farcied with old 
Gaulish grossness. It was he who invented the comic 
valet — badgered and beaten, always lying and always 
funny — who was subsequently elaborated into the im- 
mortal Sganerelle by Moliere. He, while a boy, had 
sat in this theatre, watching Turlupin; and when he 
had grown into a manager, he is said to have bought 
some of the stage copies of these farces, when Turlu- 
pin's death disbanded his troupe. 

These '' Comediens du Marais '" were regarded with 
a certain condescension not unmingled with disdain by 
their stately confreres left at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
who were shocked when Richelieu, becoming bored by 
their dreary traditional proprieties, sent for Turlupin 
and his troupe to give a specimen of their acting in his 
palace. And the great cardinal actually laughed, a 
rare indulgence he allowed himself, and told the King's 
Comedians that he wished they might play to as good 
effect ! 

Still, the Theatre du Marais was not entirely given 
over to farce, for it alternated with the tragedy of the 
then famous Hardy ; and Mondory, the best tragedian 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 147 

of the day, was at one time the head of the troupe. 
Mondory had brought back from a provincial tour, in 
1629, the manuscript of " Mehte," by a young lawyer 
of Rouen, named Corneille. This piece was weak, but 
it was not a failure. And so, when the author came 
to town, his tragedies were played at this theatre and 
drew crowds to the house. There they first saw the 
true tragic Muse herself on the French boards. Those 
rough, coarse boards of that early theatre he planed 
and polished, with conscience and with craft, and made 
them fit for her queenly feet ; and through her lips he 
breathed, in sublime tirades, his own elevation of soul, 
to the inspiration of that shabby scene. For the first 
time in the French drama, he put skill into the plot, 
art into the intrigue, taste into the wit ; in a word, he 
gave to dramatic verse " good sense " — " the only aim 
of poetry," Boileau claimed — and showed the meaning 
and the value of '' reason " on the stage ; and for the 
doing of this Racine revered him. 

As to Corneille's personality, we are told by Fon- 
tenelle — his nephew, a man of slight value, a better 
talker than writer, an unmoved man, who prided him- 
self on never laughing and never crying — that his 
uncle had rather an agreeable countenance, with very 
marked features, a large nose, a handsome mouth, eyes 
full of fire, and an animated expression. Others who 
saw Corneille say that he looked like a shopkeeper ; and 
that as to his manner, he seemed simple and timid, and 
as to his talk, he was dull and tiresome. His enuncia- 
tion was not distinct, so that in reading his own verses 



148 THE STONES OF PARIS 



— he could not recite them — he was forcible but not 
graceful. Guizot puts it curtly and cruelly, when he 
writes that Corneille was destitute of all that distin- 
guishes a man from his equals ; that his appearance was 
common, his conversation dull, his language incorrect, 
his timidity ungainly, his judgment untrustworthy. 
It was well said, in his day, that to know the greatness 
of Corneille, he must be read, or be seen in his work on 
the stage. He has said so in the verse that confesses 
his own defects : 

" J^ai la plume feconde et la bouche stirile^ 
Et Von pent rarement m'icouter sans ennui^ 
Que quandje me produis par la bouche d'autrui." 

In truth, we must agree with Guizot, that the grand 
old Roman was irrevocably doomed to pass unnoticed 
in a crowd. And he was content that this should be. 
For he had his own pride, expressed in his words : " Je 
sais ce que je vaux" He made no clamor when 
Georges de Scudery was proclaimed his superior by 
the popular voice, which is always the voice of the fool- 
ish. And when that shallow charlatan sneered at him 
in print, he left to Boileau the castigation that was so 
thoroughly given. His friends had to drive him to the 
defence of his " Cid " in the Academy, to which he had 
been elected in 1647. His position with regard to the 
" Cid " was peculiar and embarrassing ; it was Riche- 
lieu, the jealous playwright, who attacked the successful 
tragedy, and it was Richelieu, the all-potent patron, 
who was to be answered and put in the wrong. The 




Pierre Corneille. 

(From the portrait by Charles Lebrun.) 



[From a carbon print by Braun, Clement fir" Co.\ 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 149 

skirmish being ended, with honor to Corneille, he re- 
tired into his congenial obscurity and his beloved soli- 
tude. And there the world left him, alone with his 
good little brother Thomas, both contented in their 
comradeship. For in private life he was easy to get on 
. with, always full of friendliness, always ready of access 
to those he loved, and, for all his brusque humor and 
his external rudeness, he was a good husband, father, 
brother. He shrank from the worldly and successful 
Racine, who reverenced him ; and he was shy of the so- 
ciety of other pen-workers who would have made a 
companion of him. His independent soul was not 
softened by any adroitness or tact ; he was clumsy in 
his candor, and not at home in courtier-land; there 
was not one fibre of the flunky in his simple, sincere, 
self-respecting frame; and when forced to play that 
unwonted role, he found his back not limber enough 
for bowing, his knees not sufficiently supple to cringe. 
And in what light he was looked upon by the lazy 
pensioned lackeys of the court, who hardly knew his 
face, and not at all his worth, is shown by this extract 
from one of their manuscript chronicles : *' Jeudi, /^ 15 
Octobre, 1684. On apprit a Chambord la morf du bon- 
homme Corneille/' 

Jean Racine came to Paris, from his native La 
Ferte-Milon in the old duchy of Valois — by way of 
a school at Beauvais, and another near Port-Royal — 
in 1658, a youth of nineteen, to study in the College 
d'Harcourt. That famous school was in the midst of 



ISO THE STONES OF PARIS 

the Scholars' Quarter, in that part of narrow, winding 
Rue de la Harpe which is now widened into Boule- 
vard Saint-Michel. On the site of the ancient college, 
direct heir of its functions and its fame^ stands the 
Lycee Saint-Louis. The buildings that give on the 
playground behind, seem to belong to the original col- 
lege, and to have been refaced. 

Like Boileau-Despreaux, three years his senior here, 
the new student preferred poetry to the studies com- 
monly styled serious, and his course in theology led 
neither to preaching nor to practising. He was a wide 
and eager reader in all directions, and developed an 
early and ardent enthusiasm for the Greeks and the 
Latins. 

As early as 1660 he had made himself known by his 
ode in celebration of the marriage of Louis XIV. ; 
while he remained unknown as the author of an unac- 
cepted and unplayed drama in verse, sent to the The- 
atre du Marais. 

Racine's Paris homes were all in or near the " Pays 
Latin," for he preserves its ancient appellation in his 
letters. On leaving college, in 1660-61, he took up 
quarters with his uncle Nicolas Vitart, steward and in- 
tendant of the Duchesse de Chevreuse, and secretary of 
her son the Due de Luynes. Vitart lived in the Hotel 
de Luynes, a grand mansion that faced Ouai des 
Grands-Augustins, and stretched far back along Rue 
Git-le-Coeur. It was torn down in 167 1. La Fontaine 
had lodgings, during his frequent visits to Paris at this 
period, a little farther west on Quai des Grands-Au- 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 151 

gustins, and he and Racine, despite the eighteen years' 
difference of age, became close companions. La Fon- 
taine made his young friend acquainted with the caba- 
rets of the quarter, and Racine studied them not un- 
wilHngly. Just then, too, Racine doubtless met Moliere, 
recently come into the management of the theatre of the 
Palais-Royal. An original edition of " Les Precieuses 
Ridicules," played a while before this time at the Hotel 
du Petit-Bourbon, bears on its title-page " Privilege au 
Sr. de Luyne." This was Guillaume de Luyne, book- 
seller and publisher in the Salle des Merciers of the 
Palais de Justice ; and at his place, a resort for book- 
loving loungers, we may well believe that the actor- 
manager made acquaintance with the young poet, com- 
ing from his home with the Due de Luynes, within 
sight across the narrow arm of the river. 

Not as a poet was he known in this ducal house, but 
as assistant to his uncle, and the probable successor of 
that uncle, who tried to train him to his future duties. 
Among these duties, just then, was the construction 
of the new Hotel de Luynes for the Duchesse de 
Chevreuse. This is the lady who plays so prominent 
a role in Dumas's authentic history of " The Three 
Musketeers." The hotel that was then built for her 
stands, somewhat shorn of its original grandeur, at 
No. 201 Boulevard Saint-Germain, and you may look 
to-day on the walls constructed under the eye of Jean 
Racine, acting as his uncle's overseer. This uncle was 
none too rigid of rule, nor was the household, from 
the duchess down, unduly ascetic of habit ; and young 



152 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Racine, '' nothing loath," spent his days and eke his 
nights in somewhat festive fashion. His anxious coun- 
try relatives at length induced him to leave the wicked 
town, and in November, i66i, he went to live at Uzes, 
near Nimes, in Languedoc. Here he was housed with 
another uncle, of another kidney; a canon of the lo- 
cal cathedral, able to offer church work and to prom- 
ise church preferment to the coy young cleric. 

Racine was bored by it all, and mitigated his bore- 
dom, during the two years he remained, only by flirt- 
ing and by stringing rhymes. The ladies were left be- 
hind, and the verses were carried to the capital, on his 
return in November, 1663. He showed some of them, 
first to Colbert and then to Moliere, who received the 
verse with scant praise, but accepted, paid for, and 
played ** La Thebaide " — a work of promise, but of no 
more than promise, of the future master hand. It was 
at this period, about 1664, that Racine, of his own 
wish, first met Boileau, who had criticised in a kindly 
fashion some of the younger poet's verses. Thus was 
begun that friendship which was to last unmarred so 
many years, and to be broken only by Racine's death. 

With Corneille, too, Racine made acquaintance, in 
1665, and submitted to him his " Alexandre." He was 
greatly pleased by the praise of the author of the 
" Cid " ; praise freely given to the poetry of the play, 
but along with it came the set-off that no talent for 
tragedy was shown in the piece. It was not long before 
the elder poet had to own his error, and it is a sorrow 
to record his growing discontent with the younger 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 153 



man's triumphs. Racine believed then and always, that 
Corneille was easily his master as a tragic dramatist ; 
a belief shared with him by us of to-day, who find Cor- 
neille's tragedies as impressive, his comedies as spirited, 
as ever, on the boards of the Comedie Frangaise ; while 
Racine's tragic Muse seems to have outlived her day 
on those boards, and to have grown aged and out of 
date, along with the social surroundings amid which 
she queened it. 

Racine's reverence for his elder and his better never 
wore away, and on Corneille's death — when, to his 
place in the Academy, his lesser brother Thomas was 
admitted — it fell to Racine, elected in 1673, to give 
the customary welcome to the new Academician, and 
to pay the customary tribute to his great forerunner. 
He paid it in words and in spirit of loyal admiration, 
and no nobler eulogy of a corrival has been spoken 
by any man. 

On his return to town, in 1663, Racine had found his 
uncle-crony Vitart living in the new Hotel de Luynes, 
and in order to be near him he took lodging in Rue de 
Crenelle. It was doubtless at the eastern end of that 
street, not far from the Croix-Rouge — a step from Boi- 
leau in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, and not far from La 
Fontaine on Quai Malaquais. Here he stayed for four 
years, and in 1667 he removed to the Hotel des Ursins. 
This name had belonged to a grand old mansion on the 
north bank of He de la Cite, presented by the City of 
Paris to Jean Juvenal des Ursins, Prevot des Marchands 
under Charles VI. In the old prints, we see its two 



154 ^HE STONES OF PAkiS 

towers rising sheer from the river, and behind them its 
vast buildings and spacious grounds extending far 
away south on the island. According to Edouard 
Fournier, a painstaking topographer, all this structure 
was demolished toward the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and over its site and through its grounds were 
cut the three streets bearing its name of des Ursins — 
Haute, Milieu, Basse. Other authorities claim that 
portions of the hotel still stand there, among them that 
portion in which Racine lived ; his rooms having re- 
mained unaltered up to 1848. The street is narrow and 
dark, all its buildings are of ancient aspect, and on its 
south side is a row of antiquated houses that plainly 
date back to Racine's day and even earlier. It is in 
one of these that we may establish his lodgings. 

The house at No. 5, commonly and erroneously 
pointed out as his residence, is of huge bulk, extending 
through to Rue Chanoinesse on the south. No. 7 would 
seem to be still more ancient. No. 9 is simply one wing 
of the dark stone structure, of which No. 1 1 forms the 
other wing and the central body, massive and gloomy, 
set back from the street behind a shallow court, be- 
tween these wings. In the low wall of this court, under 
a great arch, a small forbidding door shuts on the pave- 
ment, and behind, in a recess, is an open stairway lead- 
ing to the floor above. No. 13 was undoubtedly once a 
portion of the same fabric. All these street windows 
are heavily barred and sightless. These three houses 
evidently formed one entire structure at first, and this 
was either an outlying portion of the Hotel des Ursins, 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 155 



or a separate building, erected after the demolition of 
that hotel, and taking the old name. In either case, 
there can be no doubt that these are the walls that 
harbored Racine. The tenants of his day were mostly 
men of the law who had their offices and residential 
chambers here, by reason of their proximity to the 
Palais de Justice. With these inmates Racine was cer- 
tainly acquainted— the magistrates, the advocates, the 
clerks, of whom he makes knowing sport in his delight- 
ful little comedy, '' Les Plaideurs." It was played at 
Versailles, " by royal command," before King and court 
in 1668. This was not its original production, however ; 
it had had its first night for the Paris public a month 
earlier, and had failed ; possibly because it had not yet 
received royal approval. Moliere, one of the audience 
on that first night, was a more competent critic of its 
quality, and his finding was that " those who mocked 
merited to be mocked in turn, for they did not know 
good comedy when they saw it'^ This verdict gives 
striking proof of his innate loyalty to a comrade in 
trade, for he and the author were estranged just then, 
not by any fault of Moliere, and he had the right to feel 
wronged, and by this unasked praise he proved himself 
to be the more manly of the two. 

The piece was an immediate success at Versailles. 
The Roi Soleil beamed, the courtiers smiled, the crowd 
laughed. The players, unexpectedly exultant, climbed 
into their coaches as soon as they were free, and drove 
into town and to Racine, with their good news. This 
whole quiet street was awakened by their shouts of con- 



V 
V 



156 THE STONES OF PARIS 

gratulation, windows were thrown open by the alarmed 
burghers, and when they learned what it meant, they 
all joined in the jubilation. 

Racine lived here from 1667 to 1677, and these ten 
years were years of unceasing output and of unbroken 
success. Beginning with his production of '' Andro- 
maque " in the first-named year, he went, through 
successive stage triumphs, to '' Phedre," his greatest 
and his last play for the public stage, produced on 
New Year's Day of 1677, at the Hotel de Bourgogne. 
It was on these boards that almost all his plays were 
first given. 

Then, at the age of thirty-seven, at the top of his 
fame, in the plenitude of his powers, he suddenly 
ceased to write for the stage. This dis-service to dra- 
matic literature was brought about by his forthcoming 
marriage, by his disgust with the malice of his rivals, 
by his weariness of the assaults of his enemies, by his 
somewhat sudden and showy submission to the Church 
— that sleepless assailant of player and playwright. He 
hints at the attitude of the godly in his preface to 
** Phedre," assuring them that they will have to own 
— however, in other respects, they may or may not es- 
teem this tragedy — that it castigates Vice and punishes 
Badness as had no previous play of his. Doubtless he 
was hardened in this decision, already made, by the 
hurt he had from the reception of this play in contrast 
with the reception of a poorer play for which his own 
title was stolen, which was produced within three 
nights of his piece, and was acclaimed by the cabal that 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 157 



damned the original. Nor was it only his rivals and 
enemies who decried him. " Racine et le cafe passe- 
ront," was La Harpe's contemptuous coupling of the 
playwright with the new and dubious drink, just then 
on its trial in Paris. His mot has been mothered on 
Madame de Sevigne, for she, too, took neither to 
Racine nor to coffee. And a century later it pleased 
Madame de Stael to prove, to her own gratification, 
that his tragedies had already gone into the limbo of 
out-worn things. 

Racine's whole life — never notably sedate hitherto, 
with its frequent escapades and its one grand passion — • 
was turned into a new current by his love match with 
Catherine de Romenet. On his marriage in June, 1677 
— among the temoins present were Boileau-Despreaux 
and Uncle Vitart, this latter then living in the same 
house with his nephew — Racine ranged himself on the 
side of order and of domestic days and nights. He gave 
proof of a genuine devotedness to his wife; a good 
wife, if you will, yet hardly a companion for him in 
his work at home and in the world outside. It is told 
of her, that she never saw one of his pieces played, nor 
heard one read; and Louis, their youngest son, says 
that his mother did not know what a verse was. 

The earliest home of the new couple was on lie 
Saint-Louis. Neither the house nor its street is to be 
identified to-day, but both may surely be seen, so slight 
are the changes even now since that provincial village, 
in the heart of Paris, was built up from an island wash- 
house and wood-yard under the impulse of the plans 



158 THE STONES OF PARIS 

prepared for Henri IV., by his right hand, Sully. And 
in this parish church, Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile — a provin- 
cial church quite at home here — we find Racine holding 
at the font his first child, Jean-Baptiste, in 1678. 

Two years later he moved again, and from early in 
1680 to the end of 1684 we find him at No. 2 Rue de 
I'Eperon, on the corner of Rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts. 
Here his family grew in number, and the names of three 
of his daughters, Marie-Catherine, Anne, and Elisa- 
beth — all born in this house — appeared on the bap- 
tismal register of his parish church, Saint-Andre- 
des-Arts. This was the church of the christening of 
Frangois-Marie Arouet, a few years later. The Place 
Saint-Andre-des-Arts, laid out in 1809, now covers the 
site of that very ancient church, sold as National Do- 
main in 1797, and demolished soon after. 

This residence of Racine was left intact until within 
a few years, when it was replaced by the Lycee Fenelon, 
a government school for girls. There they read their 
'' Racine," or such portions as are permitted to the 
Young Person, not knowing nor caring that on that 
spot the author once lived. 

From here he removed, at the beginning of the year 
1685, to No. 16 Rue des Maqons. That street is now 
named Champollion, and the present number of his 
house cannot be fixed. It still stands on the western 
side of the street, about half way up between Rue des 
Ecoles and Place de la Sorbonne ; for none of these 
houses have been rebuilt, and the street itself is as se- 
cluded and as quiet as when Racine walked through it. 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 159 



Here were born his daughters Jeanne and Madeleine, 
both baptized in the parish church of Saint-Severin — 
a venerable sanctuary, still in use and quite unaltered, 
except that it has lost its cloisters. And in this home 
in Rue des Masons he brought to life two plays finer 
than any of their forerunners, yet, unlike them, not 
intended for public performance. " Esther " was writ- 
ten in 1689 to please Madame de Maintenon, and was 
performed several times by the girls at her school of 
Saint-Cyr; first before King and court, later before 
friends of the court and those who had sufficient influ- 
ence to obtain the eagerly sought invitation. '' Athalie," 
written for similar semi-public production, two years 
later, failed to make any impression, when played at 
Versailles by the same girls of Saint-Cyr. After two 
performances, without scenery or costumes, it was 
staged no more, and had no sale when published by the 
author. Yet Boileau told him that it was his best work, 
and Voltaire said that it was nearer perfection than any 
work of man. Indeed, " Athalie," in its grandeur and 
its simplicity, may easily outrank any production of the 
French pen during the seventeenth century. And, as 
literature, these two plays are almost perfect speci- 
mens of Racine's almost perfect art and diction; of 
that art, wherein he was so exquisite a craftsman ; of 
that diction, so rich, so daring, so pliable, so passion- 
ate, yet restrained, refined, judicious. 

In May, 1692, we learn by a letter to Boileau, Racine 
was still in Rue des Magons, but he must have left it 
shortly after, for in November of this year he brought 



i6o THE STONES OF PARIS 

to be christened, in Saint-Sulpice, his youngest child, 
Louis. This is the son who has left us an admirable 
biography of his father, and some mediocre poems — • 
" La Religion " and '' La Grace " being those by which 
he is best known. So that Saint-Sulpice was, already 
in November, 1692, the church of his new parish ; and 
the house to which he had removed in that parish, 
wherein the boy was born, stands, quite unchanged to- 
day, in Rue Visconti. That street was then named Rue 
des Marais-Saint-Germain, having begun life as a coun- 
try lane cut through the low marshy lands along the 
southern shore. It extends only from Rue de Seine to 
Rue Bonaparte, then named Rue des Petits-Augus- 
tins. Near its western end, at the present number 
21, the Marquis de Ranes had erected a grand man- 
sion; and this, on his death in 1678, was let out 
in apartments. It is asserted that it is the house of 
whose second floor Racine became a tenant. Within 
the great concave archway that frames the wide en- 
trance door is set a tablet, containing the names 
of Racine, of La Champmesle, of Lecouvreur, and 
of Clairon, all of whom are claimed to have been in- 
habitants of this house. That tablet has carried con- 
viction during the half-century since it was cut and set, 
about 1855, but its word is to be doubted, and many 
of us believe that the more ancient mansion at No. 13 
of the street was Racine's home. Local tradition makes 
the only proof at present, and the matter cannot be ab- 
solutely decided until the lease shall be found in that 
Parisian notary's office where it is now filed away and 




Rue Visconti. 

On the right is the Hotel de Ranes, and in the distance is No. 13. 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS i6i 



forgotten. We know that Mile. Lecouvreur lived in 
the house formerly tenanted by Racine, and that she 
speaks of it as being nearly at the middle of the street, 
and this fact points rather to No. 13 than to No. 21. 
And we know that Mile. Clairon had tried for a long 
time to secure an apartment in the house honored by 
memories of the great dramatist and the great actress ; 
for whose sake she was willing to pay the then enor- 
mous rental of 200 francs. But the tablet's claim to 
La Champmesle as a tenant is an undue and unpar- 
donable excess of zeal. Whatever Racine may have 
done years before in his infatuation for that bewitching 
woman, he did not bring her into his own dwelling ! 

She had come from Rouen, a young actress looking 
for work, along with her husband, a petty actor and 
patcher-up of plays ; for whose sake she was admitted 
to the Theatre du Marais. How she made use of this 
chance is told by a line in a letter of Madame de Se- 
vigne, who had seen her play Atalide in " Bajazet," 
and pronounced " ma belle Me " — so she brevets her 
son's lady-love — as '' the most miraculously good come- 
dienne that I have ever seen." It was on the boards 
of the Hotel de Bourgogne that she showed herself to 
be also the finest tragedienne of her time. She shone 
most in " Bajazet," and in others of Racine's plays, 
creating her roles under his admiring eye and under his 
devoted training. He himself declaimed verse marvel- 
lously well, and had in him the making of a consum- 
mate comedian, or a preacher, as you please. La Champ- 
mesle was not beautiful or clever, but her stature was 



162 THE STONES OF PARIS 

noble, her carriage glorious, her voice bewitching, her 
charm irresistible. And La Fontaine sang praises of 
her esprit, and this was indeed fitting at his age then. 
She lived somewhere in this quarter, when playing in 
the troupe of the widow Moliere at the Theatre Guene- 
gaud. When she retired from those boards, she found 
a home with her self-effacing husband in Auteuil, and 
there died in 1698. 

The first floor in the right wing of the court of both 
13 and 21 is said to be the residence of Adrienne Le- 
couvreur. She had appeared in 171 7 at the Comedie 
Franqaise, in Rue de I'Ancienne-Comedie, and had won 
her place at once. The choice spirits of the court, of the 
great world, of the greater world of literature, were 
glad to meet in fellowship around her generous and 
joyous table. Among them she found excuse for an 
occasional caprice, but her deepest and most lasting pas- 
sion was given to the superb adventurer, Maurice de 
Saxe. His quarters, when home from the wars — for 
which her pawned jewels furnished him forth — were 
only a step down Rue Bonaparte from her house, on 
Quai Malaquais. They were at No. 5, the most ancient 
mansion left on the quay, with the exception of No. i, 
hid behind the wing of the Institute. He died at Cham- 
bord on November 30, 1750, and at this house, May 17, 
175 1, there was an auction of his effects. 

There came a time when the meetings of these two 
needed greater secrecy, and he removed to !Rue de Co- 
lombier, now named Rue Jacob. The houses on the 
north side of this ancient street had — and some of them 



MO LI ERE AIVD HIS FRIENDS 163 

still have — gardens running back to the gardens of the 
houses on the south side of Rue Visconti. These little 
gardens had, in the dividing fence, gates easily opened 
by night, for others besides Adrienne and Maurice, as 
local legend whispers. Scribe has put their story on the 
stage, vv^here it is a tradition that the actress was actually 
poisoned by a great lady, for the sake of the fascinating 
lover. He stood by her bedside, with Voltaire and the 
physician, when she was dying in 1730, at the early age 
of thirty-eight, in one of the rooms on this first floor 
over the court. Voltaire had had no sneers, but only 
praise for the actress, and smiles for the woman whose 
kind heart had brought her to his bedside, when he was 
ill, where she read to him the last book out, the trans- 
lation of the " Arabian Nights." He was stirred to 
stinging invective of the churlish priest of Saint-Sul- 
pice, who denied her church-burial. In the same verse 
he commends that good man. Monsieur de Laubiniere, 
who gave her body hasty and unhallowed interment. 
He came, by night, with two coaches and three men, and 
drove with the poor body along the river-bank, turning 
up Rue de Bourgogne to a spot behind the vast wood- 
yards that then lined the river-front. There, in a hole 
they dug, they hid her. The fine old mansion at No. 
115 Rue de Crenelle, next to the southeast corner of 
Rue de Bourgogne, covers her grave. In its garret, 
thrown into one corner and almost forgotten, is a mar- 
ble tablet, long and narrow, once set in a wall on this 
site, to mark the spot so long ignored — as its inscription 
says — where lies an actress of admirable esprit, of good 



1 64 THE STONES OF PARIS 

heart, and of a talent sublime in its simplicity. And 
it recites the efforts of a true friendship, which got at 
last only this little bit of earth for her grave. 
' Yet a few years further on, the same wing on the 
court of this dingy old house sparkled with the splendid 
personality of Hippolyte Clairon, who outshines all 
other stars of the French stage, unless it be Rachel. 
Here she lived the life of one of those prodigal prin- 
cesses, in whose roles she loved to dazzle on the boards 
of the Comedie Franqaise, where she first appeared in 
1743. It was her public and not her private perform- 
ances that shocked the sensitive Church into a threat 
of future terrors for her. When, in the course of a the- 
atrical quarrel, she refused to play, she was sent to pri- 
son, being one of '' His Majesty's Servants," disobedi- 
ent and punishable. She preferred possible purgatory 
to present imprisonment, and went back to her duty. 

To this house again came Voltaire, as her visitor 
this time, along with Diderot and Marmontel and many 
such men. Garrick came, too, when in Paris — came 
quietly, less eager to proclaim his ardent admiration 
for the woman than his public and professional ac- 
clamation of the actress in the theatre. Her parts all 
played, she left the stage when a little past forty, and, 
sinking slowly into age and poverty and misery, she 
died at the age of eighty in 1803. 

All these flashing fireworks are dimmed and put to 
shame by the gentle glow and the steadfast flame of 
the wood-fire on Racine's home hearthstone. It lights 
up the gloomy, mean street, even as we stand here. 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 165 

He was, in truth, an admirable husband and father, 
and it is this side of the man that we prefer to regard, 
rather than that side turned toward other men. Of 
them he was, through his over-much ambition, easily 
jealous, and, being sensitive and suspicious as well, and 
given to a biting raillery, he alienated his friends. 
Boileau alone was too big of soul to allow any es- 
trangement. These two were friends for almost forty 
years, in which not one clouded day is known. The 
letters between them — those from 1687 to 1698 are 
still preserved— show the depth of Racine's manly and 
delicate feeling for his friend, then " in his great soli- 
tude at Auteuil." They had been appointed royal 
historiographers soon after Racine's marriage in 1677, 
and, in that office, travelled together a good deal, in 
the Ghent campaign of 1678 and again with the army 
in other fields. They worked together on their notes 
later, and gathered great store of material ; but the re- 
sult amounted to nothing, and they were posthumously 
lucky in that their unfinished manuscript was finally 
burned by accident in 1726. 

Whether with Boileau in camp, or alone in the Lux- 
embourg campaign of 1683 — Boileau being too ill to 
go — or at Namur in 1692, or with the King and court 
at Fontainebleau, Marly, Versailles, in these royal 
residences where he had his own rooms, wherever he 
was, Racine never seemed to cease thinking of his 
home, that home in Rue des Magons when he first 
went away, and for the last seven years of his life in 
Rue Visconti. When absent from home he wrote to 



i66 THE STONES OF PARIS 

his children frequently, and when here he corresponded 
constantly with his son, who was with the French Em- 
bassy at The Hague. To him he gave domestic details 
and " trivial fond records " of what his mother was 
doing, of the colds of the younger ones, and of the 
doings of the daughter in a convent at Melun. He 
sends to this son two new hats and eleven and a half 
louis d'or, and begs him to be careful of the hats and 
to spend the money slowly. 

Yet he was fond of court life, and, an adroit courtier, 
he knew how to sing royal prowess in the field and 
royal splendor in the palace. He had a way of carry- 
ing himself that gave seeming height to his slight 
stature. His noble and open expression, his fine wit, 
his dexterous address, his notable gifts as a reader to 
the King at his bedside, made him a favorite in that 
resplendent circle. And he was all the more unduly de- 
jected when the Roi Soleil cooled and no longer smiled 
on him ; he was killed when Madame de Maintenon 
— " Goody Scarron," " Old Piety," " the hag," " the 
hussy," " that old woman," are the usual pet epithets 
for her of delicious ■ Duchesse d'Orleans — who had 
liked and had befriended him, saw the policy of show- 
ing him her cold shoulder, as she had shown it to 
Fenelon. From this shock, Racine, being already 
broken physically by age and illness, seemed unable 
to rally. As he sank gradually to the grave he made 
sedulous provision for his family, dictating, toward 
the last, a letter begging for a continuance of his pen- 
sion to his widow, which, it is gladly noted, was after- 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 167 

ward done. He urged, also, the claim of Boileau to 
royal favor : '' We must not be separated," he said to 
his amanuensis ; ** begin your letter again, and let 
Boileau know that I have been his friend to my death." 
His death came on April 21, 1699. His body lay 
one night in the choir of Saint-Sulpice, his parish 
church, and then it was carried for burial to the Abbey 
of Port-Royal. On the destruction of that institution, 
his remains were brought back to Paris, in 171 1, and 
placed near those of Pascal, at the entrance of the lady- 
chapel of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. Racine's epitaph, 
in Latin, by Boileau, the friend of so many men who 
were not always friendly with one another, is cut in a 
stone set in the first pillar of the southern aisle of the 
choir. 

Jean de la Fontaine began to come to Paris, mak- 
ing occasional excursions from his native Chateau- 
Thierry, in Champagne, toward 1654, he being then 
over thirty years of age. A little later, when under 
the protection and in the pay of the great Fouquet, 
his visits to the capital were more frequent and more 
prolonged. He commonly found lodgings on Quai 
des Grands- Augustins, just around the corner from 
young Racine, and the two men were much together 
during the years 1660 and 1661. La Fontaine made 
his home permanently in the capital after 1664, when 
he arrived there in the train of the Duchesse de Bou- 
illon, born Anne Mancini, youngest and liveliest of 
Mazarin's many dashing nieces. Her marriage with 



1 68 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the Due de Bouillon had made her the feudal lady of 

Chateau-Thierry, and if she were not compelled to 

claim, in this case, her privilege as chatelaine over her 

appanage, it was because there was ampler mandate 

for the impressionable poet in the caprice of a wilful 

woman. Incidentally, in this flitting, he left behind 

his provincial wife. He had taken her to wife in 1647, 

mainly to please his father, and soon, to please her 

and himself, they had agreed on a separation. They 

met scarcely any more after his definite departure. 

There is a tradition that he chatted, once in a salon 

somewhere, with a bright young man by whom he \ 

found himself attracted, and concerning whom he | 

made inquiry of the bystanders, who informed him | 

that it was his son. Tradition does not record any i 

attempt on his part to improve his acquaintance with 

the young stranger, or to show further interest in his | 

welfare. 

He did not entirely desert his country home, for 
the duchess carried him along on her autumnal visits : 

to Chateau-Thierry. He took advantage of each 
chance thus given him to realize something upon his 
patrimony, that he might meet the always pressing , 

claims on his always overspent income. j! 

He writes to Racine during one of these visits, in \\_ 

1686 : " My affairs occupy me as much as they're worth ! 

it, and that's not at all ; and the leisure I thus get is \ 

given to laziness." He almost anticipated in regard to 
himself the racy saying of the Oxford don of our day ; 

of another professor : " Such time as he can save from i\ 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 169 

the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect 
of his duties." But La Fontaine neglected not only 
his duties all through life, but, more than all else, did 
he neglect the care of his dress. A portion of the in- 
come he was always anticipating came from his salary 
at one time, as gentleman in the suite of the dowager 
Duchesse d'Orleans, that post giving him quarters in 
the Luxembourg. These quarters and his salary went 
from him with her death. For several years after 
coming to town with the Duchesse de Bouillon he had 
a home in the duke's town-house on Quai Malaquais. 

This quay had been built upon the river-front soon 
after the death, in 161 5, of Marguerite de Valois, 
Henri IV. 's divorced wife. The streets leading from 
Quais Malaquais and Voltaire, and those behind, paral- 
lel with the quays, were cut through her grounds and 
through the fields farther west. This was the begin- 
ning of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. To save the 
long detour, to and from the new suburb, around by 
way of Pont-Neuf, a wooden bridge was built in 1632 
along the line of the ferry, that had hitherto served 
for traffic between the shore in front of the Louvre 
and the southern shore, at the end of the road that is 
now Rue du Bac. The Pont Royal has replaced that 
wooden bridge. One of the buildings that began this 
river-front remains unmutilated at the corner of Quai 
Malaquais and Rue de Seine, and is characteristic of 
the architecture of that period in its walls and roofs 
and windows clustering about the court. It was the 
majfiy years' dwelling of the elder Visconti, and his 



I70 THE STONES OF PARIS 

death-place in 1818. The house at No. 3 was erected 
early in the nineteenth century, on the site of Buzot's 
residence, as shall be told in a later chapter. In it 
Humboldt lived from 1815 to 1818. The associations 
of No. 5 have already been suggested. The largest 
builder on the quay was Cardinal Mazarin, whose col- 
lege, to which he gave his own name, and to which 
the public gave the name College des Quatre-Nations, 
is now the Palais de ITnstitut. He paid for it with 
money wrung from wretched France, as he so paid 
for the grand hotel he erected for another niece, Anne 
Marie Martinozzi, widow of that Prince de Conti who 
was Moliere's school friend. On the ground that it 
covered was built, in 1860-62, the wing of the Beaux- 
Arts at Nos. II and 13 Quai Malaquais. That school 
has also taken possession of the Hotel de Bouillon of 
the cardinal's other niece, almost alongside. It had 
been the property of the rich and vulgar money-king 
Baziniere, whom we shall meet again, and he had sold 
it to the Due de Bouillon. The pretty wife of this 
very near-sighted husband had the house re-decorated, 
and filled it with a marvellous collection of furniture, 
paintings, bric-d-brac. She filled it, also, by her open 
table twice a day, with thick-coming guests, some of 
whom were worth knowing. The hotel came by in- 
heritance in 1823 to M. de Chimay, who stipulated, in 
making it over to the Beaux-Arts, in 1885, that its 
seventeenth-century fagade should be preserved, and 
by this agreement we have here, at No. 17 Quai Mala- 
quais, an admirable specimen of the competence of the 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 171 



elder, the great Mansart. It is higher than he left it, 
by reason of the wide, sloping roof, with many sky- 
lights toward the north, placed there for the studios 
within, but its two well-proportioned wings remain 
unchanged, and between them the court, where La 
Fontaine was wont to sit or stroll, has been laid out 
as a garden. While living here he brought out the 
first collection of his " Contes " in 1665, and of his 
'' Fables " in 1668. His '' Les Amours de Psyche," 
written in 1669, begins with a charming description 
of the meetings in Boileau's rooms of the famous 
group of comrades. 

From this home he went to the home of Madame de 
la Sabliere, with whom, about 1672, he had formed 
a friendship which lasted unbroken until her death. 
This tender and steadfast companionship made the 
truest happiness of La Fontaine's life. For twenty 
3^ears an inmate of her household, a member of her 
family, he was petted and cared for as he craved. In 
her declining years she had to be away from home at- 
tending to her charitable work — for she followed the 
fashion of turning devote as age advanced— and then 
he suffered in unaccustomed loneliness. His tongue 
spoke of her with the same constant admiration and 
gratitude that is left on record by his pen, and at her 
death he was completely crushed. 

When he was invited by Madame de la Sabliere and 
her poet-husband to share their home, they were liv- 
ing at their country-place, "La Folie Rambouillet," 
not to be mistaken for the Hotel de Rambouillet. Sa- 



172 THE STONES OF PARIS 

bliere's hotel, built by his father, a wealthy banker, 
was in the suburb of Reuilly, on the Bercy road, north 
of the Seine, not far from Picpus. The Reuilly station 
and the freight-houses of the Vincennes railway now 
cover the site of this splendid mansion and its exten- 
sive grounds. Here Monsieur de la Sabhere died in 
1680, and his widow, taking La Fontaine along, re- 
moved to her town-house. This stood on the ground 
now occupied by the buildings in Rue Saint-Honore, 
nearly opposite Rue de la Sourdiere. In the court of 
No. 203 are bits of carving that may have come down 
from the original mansion. Here they dwelt un- 
troubled until death took her away in 1693. It is re- 
lated that La Fontaine, leaving this house after the 
funeral, benumbed and bewildered by the blow, met 
Monsieur d'Hervart. " I was going," said that gen- 
tleman, " to offer you a home with me." " I was going 
to ask it," was the reply. And in this new abode he 
dwelt until his death, two years later. 

Berthelemy d'Hervart, a man of great wealth, had 
purchased, in 1657, the Hotel de I'Eperon, a mansion 
erected on the site of Burgundy's Hotel de Flandre. 
M. d'Hervart had enlarged and decorated his new 
abode, employing for the interior frescoes the painter 
Mignard, Moliere's friend. The actor and his troupe 
had played here, by invitation, nearly fifty years be- 
fore La Fontaine's coming. It stood in old Rue Pla- 
triere, now widened out, entirely rebuilt, and renamed 
Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau; and on the wall of the 
Central Post-office that faces that street, you will find 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIENDS 173 



a tablet stating that on this site died Jean de la Fon- 
taine on April 13, 1695. 

Madame d'Hervart was a young and lovely woman, 
and as devoted to the old poet as had been Madame 
de la Sabliere. She went so far as to try to regulate 
his dress, his expenditure, and his morals. Congratu- 
lated one day on the splendor of his coat. La Fontaine 
found to his surprise and delight that his hostess had 
substituted it — when, he had not noticed— for the 
shabby old garment that he had been wearing for years. 
She and her husband held sacred, always, the room 
in which La Fontaine died, showing it to their friends 
as a place worthy of reverence. 

He was buried in the Cemetery of Saints-Innocents, 
now all built over except its very centre, which is kept 
as a small park about the attractive fountain of Saints- 
Innocents. The Patriots of the Revolution, slaying so 
briskly their men of birth, paused awhile to bring from 
their graves what was left of their men of brains. 
Misled by inaccurate rumor, they left La Fontaine's 
remains in their own burial-ground, and removed what 
they believed to be his bones from the graveyard of 
Saint-Joseph, where he had not been buried, along 
with the bones they believed to be those of Moliere, 
who had been buried there. These casual and dubious 
remains were kept in safety in the convent of Petits- 
Augustins in present Rue Bonaparte, until, in the early 
years of the nineteenth century, they were removed 
for final sepulture to Pere-Lachaise. 

No literary man of his time — perhaps of any time — 



174 THE STONES OF PARIS 

was so widely known and so well beloved as La Fon- 
taine. He attracted men, not only the best in his own 
guild, but the highest in the State and in affairs. Men 
various in character, pursuits, station, were equally 
attached to him; the great Conde was glad to receive 
him as a frequent guest at Chantilly; the superfine 
sensualist, Saint-Evremond, in exile in England, urged 
him to come to visit him and to meet Waller. He 
nearly undertook the journey, less to see Saint-Evre- 
mond and to know Waller, than to follow his Duchesse 
de Bouillon, visiting her sister, the Duchess of Mazarin, 
in her Chelsea home. It was at this time that Ninon 
de Lenclos wrote to Saint-Evremond : *' You wish La 
Fontaine in England. We have little of his company 
in Paris. His understanding is much impaired." 

Racine, eighteen years his junior, looked up to La 
Fontaine as a critic, a counsellor, and a friend, from 
their early days together in 1660, through long years 
of intimacy, until he stood beside La Fontaine's bed 
in his last illness. He even took an odd pleasure in 
finding that he and La Fontaine's deserted country 
v/ife had sprung from the same provincial stock. 
Moliere first met La Fontaine at Vaux, the more than 
royal residence of Fouquet, at the time of the royal 
visit in 1661. La Fontaine wrote a graceful bit of 
verse in praise of the author of " Les Facheux," played 
for the first time before King and court during these 
festivities, and the two men, absolutely opposed in es- 
sential qualities, were fast friends from that time on. 
" They make fun of the bonhomme/' said the ungrudg- 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 175 

ing player once, '' and our clever fellows think they can 
efface him; but he'll efface us all yet." 

It is needless to say that La Fontaine was beloved 
by Boileau, the all-loving. That kindly ascetic was 
moved to attempt the amendment of his friend's laxity 
of life, and to this blameless end dragged him to 
prayers sometimes, where La Fontaine was bored and 
would take up any book at hand to beguile the time. 
In this way he made acquaintance with the Apocrypha, 
and became intensely interested in Baruch, and asked 
Boileau if he knew Baruch, and urged him to read 
Baruch, as a hitherto undiscovered genius. During 
his last illness, he told the attendant priest that he had 
been reading the New Testament, and that he regarded 
it as a good, a very good book. 

In truth, his soul was the soul of a child, and, child- 
like, he lived in a world of his own — a world peopled 
with the animals and the plants and the inanimate 
objects, made alive by him and almost human. He 
loved them all, and painted them with swift, telling 
strokes of his facile pen. The acute Taine points out 
that the brute creations of this poet are prototypes of 
every class and eyery profession of his country and his 
time. His dumb favorites attracted him especially by 
their unspoiled simplicity, for he loathed the artificial 
existence of his fellow-creatures. With '' a sullen 
irony and a desperate resignation " he let himself be 
led into society, and he was bored beyond bearing by 
its high-heeled decorum. It is said that he cherished, 
all his life long, a speechless exasperation with the 



176 THE STONES OF PARIS 

King, that incarnation of pomposity and pretence to 
his untamed GalHc spirit. Yet this malcontent had to 
put on the Hvery of his fellow-flunkies, and his dedi- 
. cation, to the Dauphin, of his " Fables," is as fulsome 
and servile as any specimen of sycophancy of that toad- 
eating age. 

Yet, able to make trees and stones talk, he himself 
could not talk. La Bruyere tells us ; coloring his por- 
traiture strongly, as was his way, and rendering La 
Fontaine much too heavy and dull, with none of the 
skill in description with his tongue that he had with 
his pen. He may be likened to Goldsmith, who " wrote 
like an angel and talked like poor Poll." Madame de 
Sabliere said to him : " Mon bon ami, que vous series 
bete, si vous n'avies pas tant d' esprit! " Louis Racine, 
owning to the lovable nature of the man, has to own, 
too, that he gave poor account of himself in society, 
and adds that his sisters, who in their youth had seen 
the poet frequently at their father's table in Rue Vis- 
conti, recalled him only as a man untidy in dress and 
stupid in talk. He gave this impression mainly be- 
cause he was forever dreaming, even in company, and 
so seemed distant and dull ; but, when drawn out of 
his dreams, no man could be more animated and more 
delightful. 

So he was found by congenial men, and so especially 
by approving women. These took to him on the spot, 
women of beauty and of wit, and women common- 
place enough. To them all his prattle was captivating, 
devoid as it was of the grossness so conspicuous in his 




La Fontaine. 

(From the portrait by Rigaud-y-Ros.) 



[J^'rom a carbon print by Braun, Cltment df Co.] 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIEIVDS 177 



poems. He depended on women in every way all 
through his life; they catered to his daily needs, and 
they provided for his higher wants ; they helped him 
in his money troubles, they helped him in all his troub- 
les. And he requited each one's care with a genuine 
affection, not only at the time, but for all time, in the 
record he has left of his gratitude and his devotion to 
these ministering women. His verse is an unconscious 
chronicle of his loves, his caprices, his inconstancies, 
and his loyalties. Nor did a woman need to be clever 
and cultivated to be bewitched by his inborn, simple 
sweetness. A matter-of-fact nurse, hired to attend 
him during an illness which came near being fatal, said 
to the attending priest : " Surely, God could not have 
the courage to damn a man like that." 

This memory he has left is brought pleasantly home 
to the passer-by in Rue de Crenelle by the sign of a 
hotel, a quiet clerical house, frequented by churchmen 
and church-loving provincials visiting Paris. The 
sign bears the name " Au bon La Fontaine/' in strik- 
ing proof of the permanent place in the common heart 
won by this lovable man. 

He was content to drift through life, his days spent, 
as he put it in his epitaph on " Jean," one-half in doing 
nothing, the other half in sleeping. He had no li- 
brary or study or workroom, like other pen-workers ; 
he lived out of doors in the open air, and wandered 
vaguely, tasting blameless epicurean delights. Some 
of us seem to see, always in going along Cours la 
Reine, that quaint figure, comical and pathetic, as he 



178 THE STONES OF PARIS 

was seen by the Duchesse de Bouillon on a rainy morn- 
ing, when she drove to Versailles. He was standing 
under a tree on this wooded water-side, and on her 
return on that rainy evening he was standing under 
the same tree. He had dreamed away the long day 
there, not knowing or not caring that he was wet. He 
explained, once when he came late — inexcusably late — 
to a dinner, that he had been watching a procession of 
ants in a field, and had found that it was a funeral; 
he had accompanied the cortege to the grave in the 
garden, and had then escorted the bereaved family 
back to its home, as bound by courtesy. 

This genuine poet, of dry, sly humor and of un- 
equalled suppleness of phrase, was by nature a gentle, 
wild creature, and by habit a docile, domesticated pet, 
attaching himself to any amiable woman who was will- 
ing to give him a warm corner in her heart and her 
house. And how such women looked on him was 
prettily and wittily put by one of them : " He isn't a 
man, he is a fablier'' — a natural product of her own 
sudden inspiration — " who blossoms out into fables as 
a tree blossoms out with leaves." 

Nicolas Boileau began his acquaintance with Mo- 
liere by his tribute of four dainty verses to the author 
of " L'Ecole des Femmes," and the friendship thus 
formed was broken only by the death of Moliere, to 
whose memory Boileau Inserted his magnificent lines 
in the " Epitre a Monsieur Racine," It was Boileau 
who criticised the early verse of young Racine, so 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 179 



justly and so gently, that the two men were drawn to- 
gether in an amity that was never marred. It was 
Boileau who, after nearly forty years of finding him 
out by the distrustful Racine, was acknowledged to 
be "noble and full of friendship." It was Boileau 
who sang without cessation praises of Racine to Louis 
XIV., and who startled the nimble mediocrity of his 
majesty's mind by the assertion that Moliere was the 
rarest genius of the Grand Monarch's reign and realm. 
It was Boileau who made, in his fondness for La Fon- 
taine, the unhappy and hopeless attempt to reform 
his friend's loose living, and in so doing nearly led to 
the undoing of La Fontaine's goodwill for him. It 
was Boileau, prompted by compassion for Corneille's 
impoverished old age, who offered to surrender his 
own pension in favor of the distressed veteran of let- 
ters. It was Boileau who found Patru forced to sell 
his cherished books that he might get food, and it 
was Boileau who bought them, on condition that Patru 
should keep them and look after them for their new 
owner. It was Boileau who tried to work a miracle 
in his comrade Chapelle by weaning him from his 
wine-bibbing; and when Chapelle found the lecture 
dry, and would listen to it only over a bottle or two, 
it was Boileau who came out of the cabaret the tipsier 
of the pair. It was Boileau who was known to every 
man who knew him at all— and he was known to many 
men of merit and demerit— as a loyal, sincere, helpful, 
unselfish friend. It was of Boileau that a perplexed 
woman in the great throng at his burial said, in the 



i8o THE STONES OF PARIS 

hearing of young Louis Racine : '* He seems to have 
lots of friends, and yet somebody told me that he 
wrote bad things about everybody." 

Those friends could have explained the puzzle. They 
mourned the indulgent comrade who was doubled with 
the stern satirist. The man, so rigid in morals and 
austere of life, was tolerant to the foibles of his friends, 
tender in their troubles, open-handed for their needs. 
The writer, so exacting in his standard and severe in 
his judgment, was cruel only with his pen. Trained 
critic in verse, rather than inspired poet, Boileau 
had an enthusiasm for good work in others equal to 
his intolerance of bad. He loathed the powdered 
and perfumed minauderies of the drawing-room poet- 
asters, and he loved the swift and sure stroke of 
Moliere's '' rare et fameux esprit." It was in frank 
admiration that he demanded of his friend : " Enseigne- 
moi ou tu trouves la rime!" For this impeccable ar- 
tist in words, who has left his profession of faith in 
the power of a word in its right place, had to reset 
and recast, file and polish, to get the perfection he 
craved. And so this bountiful admirer was easily 
an unsparing censor. Sincere in letters as in life, he 
insisted on equal sincerity from his fellow-workers, 
and would not let them spare their toil or scamp their 
stint. He watched and warned them ; his reproof and 
his approval brought out better work from them ; and 
he may well be entitled the Police President of Par- 
nassus of his country and his day. 

Boileau's sturdy uprightness of spine stood him in 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIEN-DS i8i 

good stead in that great court where all men grew 
sleek and servile, and where no pen-worker seemed 
able to escape becoming a courtier. His caustic au- 
dacity salted his sycophancy and made him a man apart 
from the herd of flatterers. His thrust was so suave, 
as well as sharp, that the spoiled monarch himself ac- 
cepted admonition from that courageous cleverness. 
" I am having search made in every direction for Mon- 
sieur Arnauld," said Louis, when eager in his pursuit 
of the Jansenists. ** Your Majesty is always fortunate ; 
you will not find him," was Boileau's quick retort, 
received with a smile by the King. When money 
was needed for Dr. Perrault's new eastern fagade of 
the Louvre and for its other alterations, the King 
naturally economized in the incomes of other men. 
The pensions of literary men — in many instances the 
sole source of their livelihood — were allowed to lapse ; 
that of Boileau was continued by an order that his 
name should be entered on the Louvre pay-roll as " an 
architect paid for mason's work." His mordant reply 
to the questioning pay-clerk was : '' Yes, I am a ma- 
son." His masonry in the stately fabric of French 
literature stands unmarred to-day ; coldly correct, it 
may be, yet elegant, faultless, consummate. 

Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux was long believed to 
have been born in the country and to have played in 
the fields as a child, and so to have got his added name 
des prcmix; but it is now made certain that the house 
of his birth, in 1636, was in Rue de Jerusalem, a street 
that led to the Sainte-Chapelle, from about the middle 



1 82 THE STONES OF PARIS 

of the present Quai des Orfevres. The only field he 
knew lay at the foot of his father's garden at Crosne, 
where the lad was sometimes taken. Fields and gar- 
dens had never anything to say to this born cockney, 
and there is not a sniff of real country air in all his 
verse. The street of his birth was one of the narrow, 
dark streets of oldest Paris, on lie de la Cite; and 
the house, tall and thin, had its gable end on the court 
of the old Palais de Justice. The earliest air breathed 
by this baby was charged with satire, it would seem. 
For the room of his birth had been occupied, nearly 
half a century earlier, by Jacques Gillot, the brilliant 
canon of Sainte-Chapelle. In this room assembled in 
secret that clever band of talkers and writers, who 
planned and wrote " La Menippee " ; the first really 
telling piece of French political satire, so telling, in its 
unbridled buffoonery, that it gave spirit to the arms 
that shattered the League, and helped to put Henry 
of Navarre on the throne of France. 

After his father's death, young Nicolas kept his 
home with his elder brother Jerome, who had suc- 
ceeded to the paternal mansion, and who gave the boy 
a sort of watch-tower, built above the garrets, in which 
he could hardly stand upright. The house, the court, 
the old palace, were long since swept away, and with 
them went all the melodramatic stage-setting of Hu- 
go's " Notre-Dame de Paris " and Sue's " Mysteres de 
Paris." Only the Sainte-Chapelle is left of the scenes 
of Boileau's early years. 

He was sent for a while to College d'Harcourt, 



MOLIERE AND HIS FRIEMDS 183 

where young Racine came a little later, and was then 
put to the study of law, the family trade; passing 
by way of Beauvais College to the Sorbonne. He is 
known to have pleaded in but one case, and then with 
credit to himself. Still the law did not please him, 
any more than did the dry theology and the pedantic 
philosophy that he listened to on the benches of the 
Sorbonne. He was enamoured early of poetry and 
romance, and soon affianced himself to the Muse. This 
was his only betrothal, and he made no other mar- 
riage. He was born an old bachelor, and he soon 
sought bachelor quarters, driven by the children's 
racket from his nephew's house — also in the Cour du 
Palais — where he had found a home. This nephew 
and this house were well known to Voltaire when a 
boy, as he tells us in his " Epitre a Boileau " : 

" Chez ton neveu Dongois je passai vion enfancej 
Bon bourgeois^ qui se crtii un homme d'importa7tce" 

It is first in the year 1664 that we can place with 
certainty Boileau's residence in Rue du Vieux-Co- 
lombier, in that small apartment which fills a larger 
place in the annals of literary life than any domicile 
of that day, perhaps of any day. It was the gathering- 
place of that illustrious quartette — 

" The goodliest fellowship of famous knights 
Whereof this world holds record." 

Moliere comes from his rooms in Rue Saint-Honore, 
or from his theatre; crossing the Seine by the Pont- 



1 84 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Neuf, and passing along Rues Dauphine and de Bucy, 
and through the Marche Saint-Germain; moody from 
domestic dissensions, heavy-hearted with the recent 
loss of his first-born. Once among his friends, he lis- 
tens, as he always listened, talking but little. La Fon- 
taine saunters from the Hotel de Bouillon, by way of 
Rue des Petits-Augustins — now Rue Bonaparte — and 
of tortuous courts now straightened into streets. Sit- 
ting at table, he is yet in his own land of dreams, until, 
stirred from his musing, his fine eyes brighten, and 
he chatters with a curious blending of simplicity and 
finesse. Racine steps in from his lodging in Rue de 
Crenelle, hard by ; the youngest of the four, he, un- 
like those other two, is seldom silent, and gives full 
play to his ironical raillery. Next above him in age 
is the host; shrewd, brusque, incisive of speech and 
manner. So he shows in Girardon's admirable bust 
in the Louvre. The enormous wig then worn cannot 
becloud the bright alertness of his expression, or over- 
weigh the full lips that could sneer and the square 
chin, so resolute. These comrades talked of all sorts 
of things, and read to one another what each had 
written since they last met; read it for the sake of 
honest criticism from the rest, and with no other 
thought. For never were four men so absolutely with- 
out pose, without any pretence of earnestness, while 
immensely in earnest all the time. In " Les Amours 
de Psyche," La Fontaine assures us that they did not 
absolutely banish all serious discourse, but that they 
took care not to have too much of it, and preferred the 




Boileau-Despreaux, 

(From the portrait by Largilli^re.) 



{From a carbon print by Braun, Clement &= Co.'] 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 185 



darts of fun and nonsense that were feathered with 
friendly counsel. Best of all, his fable makes plain 
that there were no cliques nor cabals, no envy nor 
malice, among the men that made this worshipful band. 

Their table served rather to sit around than to eat 
from, for their suppers were simple, and the flowing 
bowl was passed only when boisterous Chapelle or 
other hon-vivant dropped in. For others were invited 
at times, men of the world, the court, and the camp. 
And Boileau was the common centre of these excentric 
stars, and when each, in his own special atmosphere of 
coolness, swayed from the others' vicinage, Boileau 
alone let no alienation come between him and any one 
of them. For each, he was what Racine had found 
him, *' the best friend and the best man in the world.'* 

The house was near a noted cabaret, to which they 
sometimes resorted, at the Saint-Sulpice end of the 
street. The cabaretier was the illustrious Cresnet, 
made immortal in Boileau's verse. For the poet was 
no prude, and enjoyed the pleasures of the table so 
far as his health permitted; and, a trained gastro- 
nomic artist, he knew how to order a choicely har- 
monized repast. His street is widened, his house is 
gone, and no one can fix the spot. Yet the turmoil 
of that crowded thoroughfare of to-day is deadened 
for us by the mute voices of these men. 

We have noted Boileau's camp-following with Ra- 
cine, in their roles of royal historiographers — in 1678 
and later — but he was not strong enough for these 
excursions, even though they were made a picnic for 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



the court. He was never at home on a horse, and yet 
out of place in the mud, and he could not enjoy the 
laughter he caused In either attitude, before or after 
he was thrown ; laughter that is recorded in the letters 
of Madame de Sevigne. 

It was probably because of Moliere's taking a coun- 
try place at Auteuil that Boileau began to make fre- 
quent excursions to that quiet suburb about 1667, and 
went to live in his tiny cottage there in 1685. '* He 
had acquired it," to use his biographer's words, " partly 
by his Majesty's munificence, and partly by his own 
careful economy," so that he was opulent, for a poet. 
His purchase papers were made out by the notary 
Arouet — Voltaire's father — who drew up Boileau's 
pension papers in 1692, and who did much notarial 
work for the Boileau family. The cottage stood ex- 
actly on the ground now covered by the rear wing of 
the Hydropathic Establishment, at No. 12 Rue Boileau, 
Auteuil. Here he spent the spring and summer months 
of many 'a year, always alone, but with a hand-shake 
and a smile for his many visitors, men of birth as well 
as men of brains. Hither Voltaire certainly came, 
when a lad living with Dongois, for he says, in his 
pleasant rhymed epistle to Boileau: 

*' "Je vis le jardinier de ta maison d'Auteidl." 
To this same " lahorieux valet," to this same 

*^ Antoi7te, gouverftetir de inon jardin d^ Auteuil" 
Boileau wrote his letter in verse in 1695. The widow 



MOLIERE AND HIS PRIENM 187 



Racine came, too, for frequent outings with her chil- 
dren, who loved the garden and adored Boileau, for 
the peaches he picked for them and the ninepins he 
played with them. Louis Racine, a sort of pupil of his, 
says that the old poet was nearly as skilful at this game 
as in versifying, and usually knocked over the entire 
nine with one ball. And when he went to town, no 
warmer welcome met the crusty old bachelor than in 
Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, still the dwelling- 
place of Racine's family. 

In great mansions, too, he had long been cordially 
received. He was a visitor at that of Madame de 
Guenegaud, which has given its site to the Hotel de la 
Monnaie, and its name to the street alongside. He was 
fond of meeting kindred spirits and kindly hosts in the 
hotel of the great Conde and his younger brother Conti. 
He was one of the select set that sat about the table 
of Lamoignon, every Monday, at his home in the Ma- 
rais, to be visited by us later. And whenever old 
Cardinal Retz came to town, Boileau hastened to the 
Hotel de Lesdiguieres, of which no stone stands in 
the street of its name. Here the white-headed, worn- 
out old fighter, compelled to live in retirement, after 
the storms and scandals of his active life, was made 
at home by his admirable niece, Madame de Lesdi- 
guieres, and here he was encircled by admiring men 
and women. Here, writes Madame *de Sevigne, his 
other niece, who came often to sit with him, Boileau 
presented to Retz early copies of '' Le.Lutrin," and of 
" L'Ars Poetique." 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



Boileau could not live in the country in winter, and 
even in summer he had to go often into town to get the 
care of his trusted physician. For he was an invalid 
from boyhood, and all his life an uncomplaining suf- 
ferer. But he hurried back, whenever permitted, to the 
pure air and the congenial solitude of his small cottage, 
where three faithful servants cared for him ; not as 
would have cared the wife, whom he ought to have had, 
all his friends said, and so, too, he thought sometimes. 
He grew lonely as life lengthened, and as he saw his 
cronies passing away, fast and faster, old Corneille be- 
ing the last of them to go. 

His winters in the great city were spent in lodgings 
on the island, in the cloisters of Notre-Dame. Their 
quiet had always attracted him, as he avows in the verse 
that quivers with his nervous irritability, caused by the 
noises of the noisiest of towns. He cries, " Does one go 
to bed to be kept awake ? " Indeed, he had rooms in the 
cloisters as early as 1683, keeping them for town quar- 
ters, in the official residence of I'Abbe de Dreux, his 
old friend, a canon of Notre-Dame. To this address 
Racine sent him a letter as late as 1687. The ecclesias- 
tical settlement within the cathedral cloisters, and its 
only remaining cottage, have been spoken of in an 
earlier chapter. The cloisters themselves survive only 
in the name of the street that has been cut through 
their former site. 

In 1699 we find Boileau living with his confessor, the 
Abbe Lenoir, also a canon of the cathedral, who had the 
privilege of residing within the cloisters. This house 



MO LI ERE AND HIS FRIENDS 189 

stood exactly where now is the southern edge of the 
fountain behind Notre-Dame, above Le Terrain and the 
Seine. His rooms were on the first floor, his bed in an 
alcove, and his windows looked out on the terrace over 
the river, as we learn by the amiable accuracy of the law- 
yer who drew up his will. Here Boileau lived through 
painful years of breaking bodily health, but with un- 
broken faculties. He yearned for his old home at Au- 
teuil, and yet he was too feeble to go so far. He had 
sold his cottage to a friend, under the condition that a 
room should be reserved always for his use. That use 
never came. One day toward the end, he summoned up 
strength to drive to the beloved place ; but all was 
changed, he changed most of all, and he hurried home 
to his lonely quarters, where death found him at ten 
o'clock in the morning of March 2, 171 1. 

His devoted servants were requited for years of 
faithful service by handsome legacies, then the rela- 
tives were provided for, and no friend was forgotten. 
The remainder of his fortune went to the " pauvres 
honteux " of six small parishes in the City. A vast 
and reverent concourse of mourners of every rank fol- 
lowed his coflin to its first resting-place. This was in 
the lower chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle, as he had or- 
dered ; the church of his baptism, and of the burial of 
his mother and father. By a strange chance, his grave 
had been dug under that very reading-desk which had 
suggested to him the subject of his most striking pro- 
duction, the heroic-comic poem " Le Lutrin." Early 
in the Revolution his remains were removed, to save 



I go THE STONES OF PARIS 



them from fortuitous profanation by the " Patriots," to 
the Museum of French Monuments estabUshed in the 
convent of the Petits-Augustins, in the street of that 
name, now Rue Bonaparte. In 1819 his bones were 
finally placed in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where, in the 
chapel of Saint-Peter and Saint-Paul, they are at rest 
behind a black marble tablet carved with a ponderous 
Latin inscription. 



I 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 




Voltaire. 

(From the statue by Houdon in the foyer of the Comedie Frangaise ) 
{From a carbon print by Braun, Clement &f Co.] 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 

''Dans la coiir du Palais, je naquis ton voisin," 
wrote Voltaire to Boileau, in one of those familiar 
rhymed letters that soften the austere rhetoric of the 
French verse of that day. The place of Voltaire's 
birth, nearly sixty years after that of Boileau, was 
in the same Street of Jerusalem, at its corner with the 
Street of Nazareth, and it was only thus as a baby that 
he came ever in touch with the Holy Land. On No- 
vember 22, 1694, the day after his birth, he was car- 
ried across the river to Saint-Andre-des-Arts — no one 
knows why his baptism was not in the island church 
of the parish — and there christened Frangois-Marie 
Arouet. His earlier y.ears were passed in the house 
of Boileau's nephew Dongois, whose airs of importance 
did not escape the keen infant eyes, as we have seen 
in the same letter in verse in our preceding chapter. 
Then he was sent to Lycee Louis-le-Grand, whither 
we have gone with young Poquelin, seventy years 
earlier. The college stands in its new stone on its old 
site in widened Rue Saint-Jacques. 

We hear of no break in the tranquil course of young 
Arouet's studies, beyond the historic scene of his pres- 

193 



194 THE STONES OF PARIS 

entation to Mile. Ninon de Lenclos at her home in the 
Marais, to which we shall go in a later chapter. This 
was in 1706, when she owned to ninety years of age at 
least, and she was flattered by the visit of the youth of 
twelve, and by the verse he wrote for her birthday. 
Dying in that year, she left a handsome sum to her 
juvenile admirer, to be spent for books. So, " seconde 
de Ninon, dont je fus Ugataire," the lad was strength- 
ened in his inclination for the career of literature he had 
already planned for himself, and in his disinclination 
for the legal career planned for him by his father. The 
elder Arouet was a flourishing notary — among his cli- 
ents was the Boileau family — who considered his own 
the only profession really respectable. He placed his 
boy, the college days being done, with one Maitre Alain, 
whose office was near Place Maubert, between Rues de 
la Bucherie and Galande, a quarter crowded then with 
notaries and advocates, now all swept into limbo. But 
young Arouet spent too many of his days and nights 
with the congenial comrades that met in the Temple ; 
*' an advanced and dangerous " troop of swells and wits 
and pen-workers, light-heartedly bent on fun, amid 
the general gloom brought by Marlborough's victories, 
and by Madame de Maintenon's persistence in making 
Paris pious. Father Arouet sent his son away to The 
Hague; the first of his many journeys, enforced and 
voluntary. When allowed to return in 171 5, he lost no 
time in hunting up his old associates ; and soon, stronger 
hands than those of his father settled him in the Bas- 
tille, in punishment for verse, not written by him, satir- 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 195 



izing the Regent and his daughter, Duchesse de Berri. 
There he spent his twenty-third year, utihzing his 
leisure to plan his " Henriade," and to finish his 
" CEdipe." When set free, he came out as Voltaire. 
Whether he took this new name from a small estate of 
his mother, or whether it was an anagram of Arouet 
ais, is not worth the search ; enough for us that it is 
the name of him, who was to become, as John Morley 
rightly says, '' the very eye of eighteenth-century il- 
lumination," and to whom we may apply his own words, 
used magnanimously of his famous contemporary, 
Montesquieu; that humanity had lost its title-deeds, 
and he had recovered them. 

Once again in the world, he produced his '' CEdipe " 
in 1718, with an immediate and resounding success, 
which was not won by his succeeding plays between 
1720 and 1724. It was during this period that he spas- 
modically disappeared from Paris, reappearing at Brus- 
sels, Utrecht, The Hague ; '' jouant a I'envoye secret," 
as was his mania then and in later years. During one 
of these flittings as an ambassador's ghost, he met Rous- 
seau, and they were close friends until the day when 
Rousseau, showing to Voltaire his " Letter to Poster- 
ity," was told that it would never reach its address! 
That gibe made them sworn enemies. In Paris, during 
these years, Voltaire had no settled home. We have 
seen him in the salon of Mile. Lecouvreur, in Rue Vis- 
conti, and we have seen him there, a sincere mourner at 
her death-bed. It has been told in an earlier chapter, 
how that fine creature had sat by Voltaire's sick-bed^ 



196 THE STONES OF PARIS 

careless of her own danger from the small-pox, with 
which he was stricken in November, 1723. He fre- 
quented many haunts of the witty and the wicked during 
these years, and a historic scene in one of these has been 
put on canvas by Mr. Orchardson. One evening in the 
year 1725, Voltaire was a saucy guest at the table of the 
Due de Sully, descendant of Henri IV.'s great minister, 
in the noble mansion in Rue Saint-Antoine, to be vis- 
ited by us later. On going out, he was waylaid and 
beaten by the lackeys of the Chevalier de Rohan-Cha- 
bot, who desired to impress by cudgels the warning 
that, while princes are willing to be amused at the table 
where sit " only princes and poets," the poets must not 
presume on the privilege. In the painting, Voltaire re- 
appears in the room to the remaining guests, dishevelled 
and outraged. Later he challenged Rohan, whose 
reply came in an order of committal to the Bastille. 
After two weeks in a cell, Voltaire's request to go to 
England in exile was gladly accorded by the govern- 
ment. 

We all know well the Voltaire of an older day, in his 
statues beside the Institute and within that building, 
beside the Pantheon, in Square Monge, and in the 
foyer of the Theatre Frangais. To see him at this 
younger day, we must turn into the court-yard of the 
Mairie of the Ninth Arrondissement at No. 6 Rue 
Drouot — an ancient and attractive family mansion. In 
the centre of the court is a modern bronze, showing 
" the ape of genius " at the age of twenty-five, a dapper 
creature with head perked up and that complacent smile 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS igy 



SO marked in all his portraits. This smirk may be due 
less to self-satisfaction than to that physical peculiarity, 
claimed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his own case, 
which is caused by the congenital shortening of the 
levator muscles of the mouth. The statue's right hand 
rests jauntily on the hip, in the left hand is a book, and 
the left skirt of the long coat is blown back, showing 
the sword that was worn by young philosophers who 
would be young bloods. The pedestal holds two bas-re- 
liefs ; the youth in Ninon's salon, the patriarch at Fer- 
ney, and cut in it are his words : " If God did not exist, 
it would be necessary to invent him." 

During his years in England, Voltaire made ac- 
quaintance with all the notable men of letters then 
living, and with William Shakespeare in his works. In 
them he tolerantly found much merit, but always styled 
their author a barbarian. Those barbarisms and savag- 
eries he civilized and smoothed to his pattern, for his 
" Brutus " is an unconscious echo of '' Julius Caesar," 
his " Zaire " a shadow of " Othello." He refused to call 
on Congreve " the gentleman," as Congreve insisted, 
but was glad to meet Congreve the playwright. Nor 
did Voltaire turn his back on men and women of fash- 
ion, but used them so cleverly as to enable him to carry 
home to France a small fortune, from the subscriptions 
to his English edition of the " Henriade." He was 
shrewd in money matters, and a successful speculator 
for many years. We first hear of him again in Paris 
in 1729, getting army contracts and making money in 
queer ways. Yet all through life his pen was always 



igS 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



busy, and in this same year it is at work in a grand 




The H6tel Lambert. 

apartment of the Hotel Lambert. This was the man- 
sion of M. du Chatelet, husband — officially only — of 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 199 

'" la sublime Emilie," with whom Voltaire had taken up 
his abode. The Hotel Lambert remains unchanged at 
the eastern end of lie Saint-Louis, looking, from be- 
hind its high wall and its well-shaded garden, at its 
incomparable prospect. Its entrance at No. 2 Rue 

A 

Saint-Louis-en-lTle opens on a grand court and an im- 
posing fagade. ** This is a house made for a king, 
who would be a philosopher," wrote Voltaire to his 
august correspondent Frederick the Great. He him- 
self was neither king of this realm nor proved himself 
a philosopher in its grotesque squabbles. Madame du 
Chatelet was as frankly unfaithful to him as to her 
husband, who was frequently called in to reconcile the 
infuriated lovers. She was a woman of unusual abil- 
ities as well as of unusual indelicacies^ with an itch 
for reading, research, and writing, her specialties be- 
ing Newton and mathematics. 

In 1733 this queer couple found it to their comfort 
to quit Paris, where Voltaire was ceaselessly beset by 
the suspicions of the powers that regulated thought in 
France. They moved about much, to Voltaire's discom- 
fort, living sometimes at Cirey, on the borders of Cham- 
pagne and Lorraine, with or without the complaisant 
du Chatelet; sometimes in a mansion taken by Vol- 
taire in Paris. This stood on the corner of two streets 
no longer existing, Rues du Clos-Georgeau and Tra- 
versiere-Saint-Honore, at No. 25 of the latter ; and its 
site now lies under the roadway of new Avenue de 
rOpera. The cutting of this avenue has left unchanged 
only the northern end of Rue Traversiere, and this has 



200 THE STORES OF PARIS 

been renamed in honor of Moliere. To place Voltaire's 
residence in the old mansion at the new number 25 in 
this street, as a recent topographer has done, is an in- 
genuous flight of fancy. 

Here Voltaire went back to live after death had taken 
" la sublime Emilie " from him, from her other lover, 
and from her husband. This legal husband was less in- 
consolable than Voltaire, whose almost incredible re- 
proach to the third man in the case makes Morality 
hold her hand before her face — peeping between the 
fingers, naturally — while Immorality shakes with frank 
laughter. On the second floor of this house, Voltaire 
remained, " de moitie avec le Marquis du Chatelet; " 
the first floor, which had been her own, being thence- 
forward closed to them both. Here he tried to find com- 
panionship with his selfish and stolid niece, Madame 
Denis, and with his protege Lekain. He transformed 
the garret into a private theatre, for the production of 
his plays, free from the royal or the popular censor; 
and for the training of Lekain in the part of Titus, in 
" Brutus." That promising, and soon accepted, actor 
made his debut at the Theatre Frangais in September, 
1750, and his patron was not among the audience. 
From this house, Voltaire went frequently across the 
river to visit Mile. Clairon in her apartment in Rue Vis- 
conti, so well known to him when tenanted by Mile. 
Lecouvreur, twenty years earlier. And from this house, 
wherein he came to be too desolate and lonely, Voltaire 
went forth from France in 175 1, to find a still more un- 
congenial home at Potsdam. With his queer life there. 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 201 

and his absurd quarrels with Frederick the Great, this 
chronicle cannot concern itself. 

" Cafe a la Voltaire " is the legend you may read to- 
day on a pillar of the Cafe Procope, in Rue de I'An- 
cienne-Comedie, directly opposite the old Comedie 
Frangaise. We have seen the mixed delight and doubt 
with which coffee was first sipped by the Parisians 
of the end of the seventeenth century, but it won 
its way, and in 1720 the Sicilian Procope opened this 
second Paris cafe. It soon became the favorite re- 
sort by night of the playwrights and play-actors, and 
the swells among the audience, of the playhouse across 
the street. Gradually the men of letters, living in and 
visiting the capital, made this cafe their gathering- 
place of an afternoon ; so that, on any day in the mid- 
dle years of the eighteenth century, all the men best 
worth knowing might be found here. Their names 
are lettered and their atrocious portraits painted on 
its inner walls. In the little room on the left, as you 
walk in on the ground floor, they treasure still, while 
these lines are written, Voltaire's table. He sat here, 
near the stage that produced his plays, sipping his 
own special and abominable blend of coffee and choco- 
late. With him sat, among the many not so notable, 
Diderot, d'Alembert, Marmontel, Rousseau, with his 
young friend Grimm — hardly yet at home in Paris, 
not at all at home with its language — and Piron, Vol- 
taire's pet enemy, who wrote his own epitaph: 

*' Ci-git Piron, 
Que ne flit rien, 
Fas meme Acadimicien*^ 



202 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Here, on an evening in 1709, sat Alain-Rene Le Sage, 
awaiting in suspense the verdict on his " Turcaret," 
brought out in the theatre opposite, after many heart- 
breaking delays; for the misguided author had con- 
vinced himself that his title to fame would be founded 
on this now-forgotten play, rather than on his never- 
to-be-neglected " Gil Bias " ! 

During the Revolution, while the Cafe de la Re- 
gence, which faces the present Comedie Franqaise, was 
the pet resort of the royalist writers, this Cafe Pro- 
cope was the gathering-place of the Republican pen- 
men; and they draped its walls in black, and wore 
mourning for three days, when word came across the 
water in 1790 of the death of Benjamin Franklin, the 
complete incarnation to them of true republicanism. 
Toward the unlamented end of the Second Empire, a 
small group of young American students was to be 
found, of an evening, in the Cafe Procope, harmlessly 
mirthful over their beer. After a while, they were 
content to sit night after night in silence, all ears for 
the monologue at a neighboring table ; a copious and 
resistless outburst of argument and invective, sprin- 
kled with Gallic anecdote and with gros mots, and 
broken by Rabelaisian laughter, from a magnificent 
voice and an ample virility. They were told that the 
speaker was one Leon Gambetta, an obscure barrister, 
already under the suspicion of the police of the '' lurk- 
ing jail-bird," whom he helped drive from France, 
within a few years. 

The old house is to-day only a pallid spectre of its 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 203 

aforetime red-blooded self, and is nourished by nothing 
more solid than these uncompact memories. Loving 
them and all his Paris, its kindly proprietor tries to 
revitalize its inanimate atmosphere by his " Soirees lit- 
teraires et musicales." In a room upstairs " ancient 
poems, ancient music, old-time song," are listened to 
by unprinted poets, unplayed dramatists, unhung paint- 
ers. Some of them read their still unpublished works. 
The patron enjoys it all, and the waiters are the most 
depressed in all Paris. 

Denis Diderot gives the effect in his work, as Gam- 
betta did in the flesh, of a living force of nature. When, 
at that same table, Diderot opened the long-locked gate, 
the full and impetuous outflow swept all before it, sub- 
merged and breathless. In his personality, as vivid as- 
that of Mirabeau, we see a fiery soul, a stormy nature, 
a daring thinker, a prodigious worker. His head 
seemed encyclopaedic to Grimm, his life-long friend ; 
and Rousseau, first friend and later enemy, asserted that 
in centuries to come that head would be regarded with 
the reverence given to the heads of Plato and of Aris- 
totle. Voltaire could imagine no one subject beyond 
the reach of Diderot's activity. Arsene Houssaye 
names him " the last man of the day of dreaming in re- 
ligion and royalty, the first man of the day of the Revo- 
lution." And John Morley, looking at him from a 
greater distance than any of these, and with keener 
eyes, ranks him higher as a thinker than either Rous- 
seau or Voltaire. As thinker, essayist, critic, cyclopse- 
dist, Diderot is indeed the most striking figure of the 



204 THE STONES OF PARIS 

eighteenth century. Rugged, uncouth, headlong, we 
see him, " en redingote de peluche grise ereintee," in the 
philosophers' alley of the Luxembourg garden, strolling 
with more energy than others give to striding. Striking 
and strong he is in the exquisite bust by Houdon in the 
Louvre, yet with a refinement of expression and a deli- 
cacy of poise of the head that are very winning. This 
effect might have been gained by a Fragonard working 
in the solid. 

Here, under the trees where meet Boulevard Saint- 
Germain and Rues de Rennes and Bonaparte, it is the 
student whom we see in bronze, leaning forward in his 
chair, a quill pen in hand, his worn face bent and intent. 
This spot was selected for the statue because just there 
Diderot resided for many years. His house was at No. 
12 Rue Taranne, on the corner of Rue Saint-Benoit, 
and it was torn down when the former street was wid- 
ened into the new boulevard. Here, young Diderot, re- 
fusing to return to the paternal home at Langres, when 
he left the College d'Harcourt — the school of Boileau 
and Racine — lived in a squalid room, during his early 
days of uncongenial toil in a lawyer's office and of all 
sorts of penwork that paid poorly — translations, ser- 
mons, catalogues, advertisements. Here he was hun- 
gry and cold and unhappy; here, in 1743, he married 
the pretty sewing-girl who lived in this same house 
with her mother, and who became a devoted and faith- 
ful wife to a trying husband. For her he had the only 
clean love of his not-too-clean life. From this garret 
he poured forth prose, his chosen form of expression, 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 205 

when poetry was the only vogue, and it is by his per- 
sistence, perhaps, that prose has come to the throne 
in France. And it was while living here that he 
originated the art-criticism of his country; clear and 
thorough, discriminating and enthusiastic. Earlier 
notices of pictures had been as casual as the shows 
themselves; begun in 1673, under Colbert's protection 
and the younger Mansart's direction, in a small pavil- 
ion on the site of the present Theatre Franqais, hav- 
ing one entrance in Rue de Richelieu, another in the 
garden, into which the pictures often overflowed. 
When Diderot wrote his notices for Grimm, the ex- 
hibitions had permanent shelter in the halls of the 
Louvre. In 1746, still in this house, he published his 
'* Philosophic Thoughts " and other essays that were 
at first attributed to Voltaire, and that at last sent the 
real author to Vincennes. There he was kept for three 
maddening months by an outraged " Strumpetocracy " 
and a spiteful Sorbonne, on its last legs of persecution 
for opinion. You may go to this prison by the same 
road his escort took, now named Boulevard Diderot, 
with unconscious topographic humor. 

To visit " great Diderot in durance," Grimm and 
Rousseau came by this road ; stopping, before taking 
the Avenue de Vincennes, at a farm-house on the edge 
of Place du Trone — now. Place de la Nation — where 
the sentimentalist quenched his thirst with milk. That 
was the day when Rousseau picked up the paradox, 
from Diderot, which he elaborated into his famous es- 
say, showing the superiority of the savage man over 



2o6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the civilized man. There is as sHght trace to be found 
of Jean- Jacques Rousseau in the Paris of to-day as in 
the minds of the men of to-day. We see him first, in 
1745, at the Hotel Saint-Quentin of our Balzac chap- 
ter, carrying from there the uncomely servant, Therese 
le Vasseur. After this he appears fitfully in Paris 
through many years. In 1772 he is in Rue Platriere — 
a street now widened and named for him — on the fourth 
floor of a wretched house opposite the present Post- 
office. There he was found by Bernardin de Saint- 
Pierre — as thin-skinned and touchy as Rousseau, yet 
somehow the two kept friendly — with his repulsive 
Therese, whom he had made his wife in 1768. This 
preacher of the holiness of the domestic affections had 
sent their five children to the foundling hospital, accord- 
ing to his own statement, which is our only reason for 
doubting that he did it. Bernardin found him, clad in 
an overcoat and a white bonnet, copying music; of 
which Rousseau knew nothing, except by the intuition 
of genius. For those who wish, there are the pilgrim- 
ages to the Hermitage at Montmorenci, occupied by 
him in 1756, and nearly forty years later by a man 
equally attractive, Maximilien Robespierre ; and to Er- 
menonville, the spot of Rousseau's death in 1778. It 
is easier to stroll to the Pantheon, where, on one side, 
is a statue of the author of " Le Contrat Social " and 
" Emile," which gives him a dignity that was not his 
in life. This tribute from the French nation was de- 
creed by the National Convention of 15 Briimaire, An 
II, and erected by the National Assembly in 1791. Dur- 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 207 

able as its bronze this tribute was meant to be, at the 
time when he was deified by the nation ; since then, his 
body and his memory have been '' cast to the dogs ; a 
deep-minded, even noble, yet wofully misarranged 
mortal." While acknowledging his impress on his gen- 
eration as an interpreter of moral and religious senti- 
ment, and without denying the claim of his admirers, 
that he is the father of modern democracy, we may 
own, too, to a plentiful lack of liking for the man. 

Released and returned to his wife in Rue Taranne, 
Diderot lost no time in beginning again that toil which 
was his life. With all his other work — '' Letters on the 
Blind, for the use of those who can see," dramas now 
forgotten, an obscene novel that paid the debts of his 
mistress — he began and carried out his Encyclopaedia. 
" No sinecure is it ! " says Carlyle : '' penetrating into 
all subjects and sciences, waiting and rummaging in 
all libraries, laboratories ; nay, for many years fear- 
lessly diving into all manner of workshops, unscrew- 
ing stocking-looms, and even working thereon (that 
the department of ' Arts and Trades ' might be per- 
fect) ; then seeking out contributors, and flattering 
them, quickening their laziness, getting payment for 
them, quarrelling with bookseller and printer, bearing 
all miscalculations, misfortunes, misdoings of so many 
fallible men on his single back." On top of all, he 
had to bear the spasmodic persecution of the Govern- 
ment instigated by the Church. The patient, gentle 
d'Alembert, with his serenity, his clearness, and his 
method, helped Diderot more than all the others. And 



208 THE STONES OF PARIS 

SO grew, in John Morley's words, '' that mountain of 
volumes, reared by the endeavor of stout hands and 
faithful," which, having done its work for truth and 
humanity, is now a deserted ruin. 

As he brought it to an end after thirty years of labor, 
Diderot found himself grown old and worn, and the 
busiest brain and hand in France began to flag. By 
now, he stood next in succession to the King, Voltaire. 
Yet, for all the countless good pages he has written, 
it has been truly said that he did not write one great 
book. Other urgent creditors, besides old age, harassed 
him, and he had to sell his collection of books. They 
were bought by the Empress Catharine of Russia, at a 
handsome value, and she handsomely allowed him to 
retain them for her, and furthermore paid him a salary 
for their care. Grimm urged on her, in one of his gos- 
siping feuilles, that have given material for so much 
personal history, the propriety of housing her library 
and its librarian properly, and this was done in the 
grand mansion now No. 39 Rue de Richelieu. We have 
come to this street with Moliere and with Mignard, and 
there are other memories along this lower length, to 
which a chapter could be given. We can awaken only 
those that now belong to No. 50. Here lived a couple 
named Poisson, and on March 19, 1741, they gave in 
marriage to Charles Guillaume le Normand their 
daughter Jeanne-Antoinette, a girl of fifteen. That 
blossom ripened and rottened into La Pompadour. 
The house is quite unchanged since that day. In a large 
rear room on its first floor, in the year 1899, future 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 2oq 



chroniclers will be glad to note that Moncure D. Con- 
way made an abbreviation of his noble life of Thomas 
Paine for its French translation. His working-room 
was in the midst of the scenes of Paine's Paris stay, but 
not one of them can be fixed with certainty. 

The house numbered 39 of this street is occupied by 
the " Maison Sterlin," a factory of artistic metal- work 
in locks and bolts and fastenings for doors and win- 
dows. It is an attractive museum of fine iron and steel 
workmanship, ancient and modern. There, in a case, 
is preserved the superbly elaborate key of Corneille's 
birth-house in Rouen. The brothers Bricard have had 
the reverent good taste to retain the late seventeenth- 
century interior of their establishment, and you may 
mount by the easy stairs, with their fine wrought-iron 
rail, to Diderot's dining-room on the first floor, its pan- 
elling unaltered since his death there, on July 31, 1784. 
He had enjoyed, for only twelve days, the grandest resi- 
dence and the greatest ease his life had known. They 
had been made busy days, of course, spent in arranging 
his books and pictures. Sitting here, eating hastily, he 
died suddenly and quietly, his elbows on the table. On 
August 1st his body was buried in the parish church of 
Saint-Roch, and the tablet marking the spot is near 
that commemorating Corneille, who had been brought 
there exactly one hundred years before. 
! This church is eloquent with the presence of these 
two, with the voice of Bossuet — " the Bible trans- 
fused into a man," in Lamartine's phrase — and with 
the ping of Bonaparte's bullets on its porch ; yet there 



210 THE STONES OF PARIS 

is a presence within, less clamorous but not less im- 
pressive than any of these. In the fourth chapel, on 
your left as you enter, is a bronze bust of a man, up 
to which a boy and a girl look from the two corners 
of the pedestal. This is the monument of Charles 
Michel, Abbe de TEpee, placed above his grave in the 
chapel where he held services at times, and the boy 
and girl stand for the countless deaf-and-dumb chil- 
dren to whom he gave speech and hearing. The son 
of a royal architect, with every prospect of preferment 
in the Church, with some success as a winning preacher, 
his liberal views turned him from this career. His 
interest in two deaf-mute sisters led him to his life- 
work. There were others in England, and there was 
the good Pereira in Spain, who had studied and in- 
vented before him, but it is to this gentle-hearted 
Frenchman that the world of the deaf and dumb owes 
most for its rescue from its inborn bondage. He gave 
to them all he had, and all he was; for their sake he 
went ill-clad always, cold in winter, hungry often. He 
had but little private aid, and no official aid at all. He 
alone, with his modest income, and with the little house 
left him by his father, started his school of instruction 
for deaf-mutes in 1760. 

The house was at No. 14 Rue des Moulins, a re- 
tired street leading north from Rue Saint-Honore, and 
so named because near its line were the mills of the 
Butte de Saint-Roch — where we are to find the head- 
quarters of Joan the Maid. One of these mills may 
be seen to-day, re-erected and in perfect preservation, 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 211 



at Crouy-sur-Ourcq, near Meaux, and above its door- 
way is the image of the patron-saint, to whom the mill 
was dedicated in the fifteenth century. This quarter 
of the town had become, during the reign of Louis 
XIV., the centre of a select suburb of small, elegant 
mansions, tenanted by many illustrious men. On the 
rear of his lot the good ahhe built a small chapel, and 
in it and in the house he passed nearly thirty years 
of self-sacrifice, ended only by his death on December 
23, 1789. When the Avenue de I'Opera was cut in 
1877-8, his street was shortened and his establishment 
was razed. At the nearest available spot, on the wall 
of No. 23 Rue Therese, two tablets have been placed, 
the one that fixes the site, the other recording the de- 
cree of the Constituent Assembly of July, 1789, by 
which the Abbe de I'Epee was placed on the roll of 
those French citizens who merit well the recognition 
of humanity and of the country. And, in 1791, amid 
all its troubled labors, the Assembly founded the In- 
stitution National des Sourds-Muets of Paris, on the 
base of his humble school. The big and beneficent in- 
stitution is in Rue Saint-Jacques, at its intersection 
with the street named in his honor. And it is an honor 
to the Parisians that they thus keep alive the memory 
of their great men, so that, in a walk through their 
streets, we run down a catalogue of all who are mem- 
orable in French history. In the vast court-yard, at 
that corner, under a glorious elm-tree, is a colossal 
statue of the ahhe, standing with a youth to whom he 
talks with his fingers. It is the work of a deaf-mute, 



212 THE STONES OF PARIS 



Felix Martin, well named, for he is most happy in 
this work. 

Like the Abbe de I'Epee, and for as many years — 
almost thirty of his half-voluntary, half-enforced ex- 
ile — Voltaire had devoted himself in his own way to 
the bettering of humanity, crippled mentally and spir- 
itually. He had given vision to the blind, hearing to 
the deaf, voice to the speechless. He took in the out- 
cast, and cherished the orphan. With his inherent pity 
for the oppressed, and his deep-rooted indignation with 
all cruelty, he had made himself the advocate of the un- 
justly condemned; and none among his brilliant pages 
will live longer than his impassioned pleadings for 
the rehabilitation of the illegally executed Jean Calas. 
And now he comes back from Ferney, through all the 
length of France, in a triumphal progress without 
parallel, welcomed everywhere by exultant worshippers. 
At four in the afternoon of February lo, 1778, his 
coach appears just where his statue now stands at the 
end of Quai Malaquais, then Ouai des Theatins. He 
wears a large, loose cloak of crimson velvet, edged 
with a small gold cord, and a cap of sable and velvet, 
and he is '' smothered in roses." His driver makes his 
way slowly along the quay, through the acclaiming 
crowd, to the home of '' la Bonne et Belle," the girl 
he had rescued from a convent and adopted, now the 
happy wife of the Marquis de Villette. Their eigh- 
teenth-century mansion stands on the corner of Rue 
de Beaune and present Quai Voltaire, unaltered in its 
simple stateliness. Here Voltaire is visited by all Paris 




The Seventeenth-century Buildnig-s on Quai Malaquais, with the 
histitute and the Statue of Voltaire. 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 213 

that was allowed to get to him. Mile. Clairon is one 
of the first, on her knees at the bedside of her old 
friend, exhausted by his triumph. She is no longer 
young, and shows that she owns to fifty-five years, by 
her retired life at the present numbers 34 and 36 Rue 
du Bac. There she has her books and her sewing and 
her spendthrift Comte Valbelle d'Oraison, who lives 
on her. 

D'Alembert and Benjamin Franklin are among his 
visitors, and the dethroned Du Barry, and thirty chefs, 
each set on the appointment of cook for the master. 
He goes to the Academy, then installed in the Louvre, 
and to the Comedie Franqaise, temporarily housed in 
the Tuileries, the Odeon not being ready. There his 
" Irene," finished just before leaving Switzerland, is 
produced, and at the performance on the evening of 
March 30th he is crowned in his box, his bust is 
crowned on the beflowered stage, and the palms and 
laurels and plaudits leave him breath only to murmur : 
" My friends, do you really want to kill me with joy? " 
That was the last seen of him by the public. He had 
come to Paris, he said, *' to drink Seine water " ; and 
either that beverage poisoned him, or the c\ip of flat- 
tery he emptied so often. Two months after that su- 
preme night, on May 30, 1778, at a little after eleven 
at night, he died in that corner apartment on the first 
floor. For thirty years after it was unoccupied and 
its windows were kept closed. 

Almost his last words, as he remembered what the 
Church had meant to him, and what it might mean 



214 THE STONES OF PARIS 

for him, were : " I don't want to be thrown into the 
roadway like that poor Lecouvreur." That fate was 
spared his wasted frame by the quickness of his 
nephew, the Abbe Mignot. Here, at the entrance-gate 
in Rue de Beaune, this honest man placed his uncle's 
body, hardly cold, in his travelling carriage, and with 
it drove hastily, and with no needless stops, to Scel- 
lieres in Champagne. There he gave out the laudable 
lie of a death on the journey, and procured immediate 
interment in the nave of his church, under all due 
rites. The grave was hardly covered before orders 
from the Bishop of Troyes arrived, forbidding the 
burial. The trick would have tickled the adroit old 
man. His body was allowed to rest for thirteen years, 
and then it was brought back in honor to Paris. A 
great concourse had assembled, only two weeks earlier, 
at the place where the Bastille had been, hoping to hoot 
at the royal family haled back from Varennes. Now, 
on July II, 1 79 1, a greater concourse was stationed 
here, to look with silent reverence on this cortege, 
headed by Beaumarchais, all the famous men of France 
carrying the pall or joining in the procession. They 
entered by the Vincennes road, passed along the boule- 
vards, crossed Pont Royal to stop before this mansion, 
and went thence to the Pantheon. There his remains 
lay once more in peace, until the Bourbons " de-Pan- 
theonized " both Voltaire and Rousseau. 

Benjam.in Franklin had come to visit Voltaire here 
on the quay, by way of the Seine from Passy, in which 
retired suburb he was then living. The traces he has 



FROM VOn^AIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 215 

left in the capital are to be found in two inscriptions 
and a tradition. We know that he had rooms, during 
a part of the year 1776, in Rue de Penthievre, and his 
name, carved in the pediment of the stately fagade of 
the house numbered 26 in that street, is a record of his 
residence in it or on its site. There is another claimant 
to his tenancy for a portion of this same year. The 
American who happens to go to or through Passy, on 
a Fourth of July, will have opportune greeting from 
the Stars and Stripes, draped over the doorway of the 
old-fashioned building, more a cottage than a man- 
sion, now numbered 21 Rue Franklin. Its owners do 
this each year, they tell you, in honor of the great 
American who occupied the cottage in 1776. Their 
claim is the more credible, inasmuch as the street has 
been given his name since his day there, when it was 
Rue Basse. In the following year he went farther 
afield, and for nine years he remained in a villa in the 
large garden, now covered by the ugly Ecole des 
Freres de la Doctrine Chretienne, at the corner of 
Rues Raynouard and Singer. The Historical Society 
of Passy and Auteuil has placed a tablet in this corner 
wall, recording Franklin's residence at this spot from 
1777 to 1785. His friend, M. Ray de Chaumont, oc- 
cupied only a portion of his Hotel de Valentinois, and 
gave up the remaining portion to Franklin for his 
residence and his office, eager to show his sympathy 
for the colonies and his fondness for their envoy. 
Only John Adams, when he came, was shocked in all 
his scrupulosity to find an American agent living rent- 



21 5 THE STONES OF PARIS 



free ! In this garden he put up the first lightning-con- 
ductor in France, and in this house he negotiated the 
treaty that gave the crown's aid to the colonies and 
made possible their independence. To this spot came 
the crowd to catch a glimpse of the homely-clad fig- 
ure, and men of science and letters to learn from him, 
and ladies from the court to caress him. And it may 
have been here that he made answer to the enamoured 
marquise, in words that have never been topped for the 
ready wit of a gallant old gentleman. 

The cortege that accompanied Voltaire's remains to 
the Pantheon was headed, it has been said, by Beau- 
marchais; fittingly so, for Beaumarchais was then 
heir-presumptive to the dramatic crown, and his 
'' Figaro " had already begun to laugh the nobility 
from out of France. Louis XVI. saw clearly, for once, 
when he said : " If I consent to the production of the 
* Marriage of Figaro,' the Bastille will go." He did 
consent, and it was played to an immense house on 
April 27, 1784, in the Comedie Frangaise, now the 
Odeon. That night the old order had its last laugh, 
and it rang strangely and sadly. Yet in this comedy, 
that killed by ridicule — the most potent weapon in 
France — once played a queen that was, and once a 
queen that was to be. On August 19, 1785, on the 
stage of the Little Trianon at Versailles, the Comte 
d'Artois — brother to Louis XIV., later to be Charles 
X. — appeared as the Barber, to the Rosina of Marie 
Antoinette. And, in the summer of 1803, during the 
Consulate, when Malmaison was the scene of gayeties, 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 217 



a theatre was constructed in the garden, and on its 
boards, Hortense (soon after Queen of Holland) made 
a success as Rosina. 

Playwriting was merely a digression in the diversi- 
fied career of this man of various aptitudes, whose 
ups and downs we have no excuse for dwelling on, as 
we trace him through Paris streets. There is no tablet 
to mark his birth, on January 24, 1732, in the house 
of his father, Caron, the watchmaker of Rue Saint- 
Denis, opposite the old Cemetery of the Innocents, 
nearly at Rue de la Ferronerie. Pierre-Augustin 
Caron he was christened, and it was in his soaring 
years that he added " de Beaumarchais." This quarter 
is notable in that it was the scene of the birth and 
boyhood of four famous dramatists — of Moliere, as 
we have seen, and of Regnard, as we shall see; of 
Beaumarchais and of Eugene Scribe. To record this 
latest birth, on December 24, 1791, a tablet is set in 
the wall of No. 32 Rue Saint-Denis, at the corner of 
Rue de la Reynie, only a few steps south of the Caron 
house. It is a plain, old-style house of four stories 
and a garret, and has become a shop for chocolates 
and sweets. It has on its sign, " Au Chat Noir" ; 
black cats are carved wherever they will cling on its 
front and side, and a huge, wooden, black cat rides on 
the cart that carries the chocolate. 

Beaumarchais had a residence at No. 6 Rue de 
Conde in 1773, and at the Hotel de HoUande, Rue 
Vielle-du-Temple 47, in 1776. We shall go there later. 
On the wall of the house, No. 2 Boulevard Beaumar- 



2i8 THE STONES OF PARIS 



chais, a tablet marks the site of his great mansion and 
its spacious gardens. These covered the entire tri- 
angle enclosed by Rues Amelot, Daval, and Roquette. 
He had found the money for this colossal outlay, not 
in his plays, but in all sorts of mercantile transactions, 
some of them seemingly shabby. It is claimed that 
he lost large sums in supplying, as the unavowed agent 
of the crown, war equipment to the struggling Ameri- 
can colonies. His palace went up in sight of the Bas- 
tille, then going down. The Parisians came in crowds 
to see his grounds, with their grottoes, statues, and 
lake; and he entertained all the swelldom of France. 
There, one day in 1792, the mob from the too-near 
Faubourg Saint-Antoine came uninvited, and raided 
house and grounds for hidden arms and ammunition, 
not to be found. The owner went to the Abbaye 
prison and thence into exile and poverty. Returning 
in 1796, he spent his last years in a hopeless attempt 
to gather up remnants of his broken fortunes, a big 
remnant being the debt neglected and rejected by the 
American Congress. The romance of this '' Lost 
Million " cannot be told here. Beaumarchais died in 
this house in 1799, and was buried in the garden. 
When the ground was taken for the Saint-Martin 
Canal in 1818, his remains were removed to Pere-La- 
chaise. The grave is as near that of Scribe as were 
their birthplaces. His name was given to the old 
Boulevard Saint-Antoine in 183 1, and in 1897 his 
statue was placed in that wide space in Rue Saint- 
Antoine that faces Rue des Tournelles. The pedestal 



FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS 219 

is good, and worthy of a more convincing statue of 
this man of strong character and of contrasting quali- 
ties. And at the Washington Head-quarters at New- 
burgh-on-Hudson, and at the various collections of 
Revolutionary relics in the United States, you will 
find cannon that came from French arsenals, and that, 
it was hinted, left commissions in the hands of Caron 
de Beaumarchais. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 




Charlotte Corday. 

(From the copy by Baudry of the only authentic portrait, painted in her prison.) 



\^From a carbon print by Brann, Clement &' Co.] 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 

It is no part of the province of this book to re- 
construct the Paris of the Revolution, nor is there 
room for such reconstruction, now that M. G. Lenotre 
has given us his exhaustive and admirable '' Paris 
Revolutionnaire." Despite the destruction of so much 
that was worth saving of that period, there yet remain 
many spots for our seeing. The cyclone of those years 
had two centres, and one of them is fairly well pre- 
served. It is the Cour du Commerce, to which we 
have already come in search of the tower and wall of 
Philippe-Auguste. Outside that wall, close to the 
Porte de Buci, there had been a tennis-court, which 
was extended, in 1776, into a narrow passage, with 
small dwellings on each side. The old entrance of the 
tennis-court was kept for the northern entrance of the 
new passage, and it still remains under the large house, 
No. 61 Rue Saint- Andre-des- Arts. The southern en- 
trance of the passage was in the western end of Rue 
des Cordeliers, now Rue de I'Ecole-de-Medecine. In 
1876, exactly one hundred years after the construction 
of this Cour du Commerce, its southern half and its 
southern entrance were cut away by modern Boule- 
vard Saint-Germain, on the northern side of which 

223 



224 THE STONES OF PARIS 

a new entrance to the court was made. At the same 
time the houses on the northern side of Rue de I'Ecole- 
de-Medecine were demoHshed, and replaced by the 
triangular space that holds the statues of Danton and 
Paul Broca among its trees. Those houses faced, 
across the street, whose narrowness is marked by the 
two curbstones, the houses, of the same age and the 
same style, that are left on the southern side of this 
section of the modern boulevard. One of the houses 
then destroyed had been inhabited by Georges-Jacques 
Danton. It stood over the entrance of the court, and 
his statue — a bronze of his own vigor and audacity — 
has been placed exactly on the spot of that entrance, ex- 
actly under his dwelling-place. The pediment of this 
entrance-door is now in the grounds of M. Victorien 
Sardou, at Marly-le-Roi. Danton's apartment, on the 
first floor above the entresol, had two salons and a bed- 
room looking out on Rue des Cordeliers, while the 
dining-room and working-room had windows on the 
Cour du Commerce. Here in 1792 he had his whole- 
some, peaceful home, with his wife and their son ; and 
to them there sometimes came his mother, or one of his 
sisters, for a visit. 

In the entresol below lived Camille Desmoulins and 
his wife in 1792. The two young women were close 
friends, and M. Jules Claretie has given us a pretty 
picture of them together, in terrified suspense on that 
raging August loth. Lucile Desmoulins knew, on the 
next day, that the mob had at least broken the windows 
of the Tuileries, for someone had brought her the 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 225 

sponges and brushes of the Queen ! And on the 12th, 
Danton carried his wife from here to the grand hotel 
in Place Vendome, the official residence of the new 
Minister of Justice. His short life in office being ended 
by his election to the Convention in the autumn of 
that year, he returned to this apartment; to which, 
three months after the death of his first wife in that 
same year, he brought a youthful bride. And here, 
on March 30, 1794, he was arrested. Before his own 
terrible tribunal his reply, to the customary formal 
questions as to his abode, was : '' My dwelling-place 
will soon be in annihilation, and my name will live in 
the Pantheon of history." He spoke prophetically. 
The clouds of a century of calumny have only lately 
been blown away, and we can, at last, see clearly the 
heroic figure of this truest son of France ; a " Mira- 
beau of the sans-cidottes," a primitive man, unspoiled 
and strong, joyous in his strength, ardent yet stead- 
fast, keen-eyed for shams, doing when others were 
talking, scornful of phrasemongers, and so genuine 
beside the petty schemers about him that they could 
not afford to let him live. 

Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist Desmoulins had, in 
his queer and not unlovable composition, a craving for 
a hero and a clinging to a strong nature. His first 
idol was Mirabeau. That colossus had died on April 
2, 1 79 1, and Desmoulins had been one of the leaders 
in the historic funeral procession that filled the street 
and filed out from it four miles in length. Mont- 
Blanc was then the street's name, and for a few days 



226 THE STONES OF PARIS 

it was called Rue Mirabeau, but soon took its present 
name, Chaussee-d'Antin, from the gardens of the 
Hotel d'Antin, through which it was cut. The present 
No. 42, with a new front, but otherwise unchanged, 
is the house of Mirabeau's death, in the front room of 
its second floor. Mirabeau's worthy successor in Ca- 
mille's worship was Danton, near whom he lived, as 
we have seen, and with whom he went as secretary 
to the Ministry of Justice. After leaving oflice, Ca- 
mille and his wife are found in his former bachelor 
home in Place du Theatre-Fran(;ais, now Place de 
rOdeon. The corner house there, that proclaims itself 
by a tablet to have been his residence, is in the wrong ; 
and that tablet belongs by right to the house on the 
opposite corner, No. 2 Place de I'Odeon and No. 7 Rue 
Crebillon. From his end windows in this latter street, 
when he had lived there as a bachelor, Camille could 
look slantwise to the windows of an apartment at No. 
22 Rue de Conde, and he looked often, attracted by a 
young girl at home there with her parents. There is 
still the balcony on the front, on which Lucile Duplessis 
ventured forth, a little later, to blow kisses across the 
street. At the religious portion of their marriage, in 
Saint-Sulpice on December 29, 1790, the temoins of 
the groom were Brissot, Petion, Robespierre. The 
last-named had been Camille's schoolfellow and crony 
at Lycee Louis-le-Grand, and remained his friend as 
long as it seemed worth while. The wedding party 
went back to this apartment — on the second floor 
above the entresol — for the diner de noces. Every- 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION- 227 



thing on and about the table — it is still shown at Ver- 
vins, a village just beyond Laon — was in good taste, 
we may be sure, for Desmoulins was a dainty person, 
for all his tears over Marat; his desk, at which he 
wrote the fiery denunciations of '' Le Vieux Cordelier," 
had room always for flowers. It was here that he was 
arrested, to go — not so bravely as he might — to prison, 
and then to execution with Danton, on April 5, 1794- 
His Lucile went to the scaffold on the 12th of the 
same month, convicted of having conspired against 
the Republic by wandering about the gardens of the 
Luxembourg, trying to get a glimpse of her husband's 
face behind his prison windov/. To us he is not more 
visible in this garden than he was to her, but in the 
garden of the Palais-Royal he leaps up, '' a flame of 
fire," on July 12, 1789, showing the Parisians the way 
they went to the Bastille on the 14th. 

In the same section with Danton and Desmoulins, 
and equally vivid with them in his individuality, we 
find Jean-Paul Marat. His apartment, where lived 
with him and his mistress, Simonne Evrard, his two 
sisters, Albertine and Catherine — all three at one in 
their devotion to his loathsome body — was in a house 
a little easterly from Danton's, on the same northern 
side of Rue de I'Ecole-de-Medecine. It was at this 
house that Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d'Armans, 
on July 13, 1793, presented herself as '" I'ange de I'as- 
sassinat," in Lamartine's swelling phrase. She had 
driven across the river, from the Hotel de la Provi- 
dence. In our Dumas chapter we shall try to find her 



228 THE STONES OF PARIS 

unpretending inn, and shall find only its site. In the 
Musee Grevin, in Paris, you may see the baignoire in 
which Marat sat when he received Charlotte Corday 
and her knife — a common kitchen-knife, bought by 
her on the day before at a shop in the Palais-Royal. 
The bath is shaped like a great copper shoe, and on 
its narrow top, through which his head came, was a 
shelf for his papers. 

The printing-office of Marat's " L'Ami du Peuple," 
succeeded in 1792 by his " Journal de la Republique 
Frangaise," was in that noisiest corner of Paris, the 
Cour du Commerce. It was in that end of the long 
building of two low stories and attic, numbered 6 and 8, 
now occupied by a lithographer. After Marat's death, 
and that of his journal, the widow Brissot opened a 
modest stationer's shop and reading-room in the for- 
mer printing-office, we are told by M. Sardou. It is an 
error that places the printing-office at the present No. 
I of the court, in the building which extended then 
through to No. 7 Rue de I'Ancienne-Comedie. These 
two lots do, indeed, join in their rear, but Marat has 
no association with either. In Rue de I'Ancienne- 
Comedie, certainly, the " Friend of the People " had 
storage room in the cellar and an office on an upper 
floor, but it was in one of the tall houses on the west- 
ern side of the street, just north of the old theatre. 

The only claim to our attention of No. i Cour du 
Commerce — a squalid tavern which aspires to the title 
of "' La Mais on Boileau " — comes from the presence of 
Sainte-Beuve. The great critic is said to have rented 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 22g 



a room, under his pen-name of " Joseph Delorme," 
for a long time in this then cleanly hotel-garni, for the 
ostensible purpose of working in quiet, free from the 
importunate solicitors of all sorts who intruded on 
his home in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, No. ii. 

Marat's death was frantically lamented by the rabble, 
that was quite unable to recognize the man's unde- 
niable abilities and attainments, and that had made 
him its idolized leader because of his atrocious taste 
in saying in print exactly what he meant. They car- 
ried his body to the nave of the church, and later to its 
temporary tomb in the garden, of the Cordeliers, a 
step from his house. In the intervals of smiling hours 
spent in watching heads fall into the basket, in new 
Place de la Revolution, they crowded here to weep 
about his bedraped and beflowered bier. The remains 
were then placed, with due honors, in the Pantheon. 
Then, within two years, the same voices that had glori- 
fied him shrieked that his body and his memory should 
be swept into the sewer. It was the voice of the peo- 
ple — the voice of Deity, in all ages and in all lands, it 
is noisily asserted. 

When the Franciscan monks, who were called Cor- 
deliers because of their knotted cord about the waist, 
came to Paris early in the thirteenth century, they 
were given a goodly tract of ground just within the 
Saint-Germain gate, stretching, in rough outlines, from 
Rues Antoine-Dubois and Monsieur-le-Prince nearly 
to Boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel. The 
church they built there was consecrated by the sainted 



230 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Louis IX. in 1262, and when burned, in 1580, was re- 
built mainly by the accursed Henri III. New chapels 
and cloisters were added in 1672, and there were many 
other structures pertaining to the order within these 
boundaries. Of all these, only the Refectory remains 
to our day. The site of the church, once the largest 
in Paris, is covered by Place de I'Ecole-de-Medecine 
and by a portion of the school; something of the 
shape and some of the stones of the old cloisters are 
preserved in the arched court of the Clinique ; bits of 
the old walls separate the new laboratories, and an- 
other bit, with its strong, bull-nosed moulding, may 
be seen in the grounds of the water-works behind No. 
II Rue Racine, this street having been cut through 
the monks' precincts, so separating the Infirmary, to 
which this wall belonged, and that stretched nearly to 
the rear walls of Lycee Saint-Louis, from the greater 
portion of '' Le Grand Convent de VOhservance de 
Saint Frangois/' 

Turn in at the gateway in the corner of Place de 
I'Ecole-de-Medecine, and the Refectory stands before 
you, a venerable fabric of Anne of Brittany's building, 
with sixteenth and seventeenth century adornments, all 
in admirable preservation. The great hall, filled with 
the valuable collection of the Musee Dupuytren, attracts 
us as a relic of ancient architecture, and as the last ex- 
isting witness of the Revolutionary nights of the Cor- 
deliers Club. That club had its hall just across the 
garden alongside the Refectory, in one of the buildings 
of the cloisters, which, with the church, had been given 




The Refectory of the Cordeliers. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 231 

over to various uses and industries. Hence the name 
of the club, enrolled under the leadership of Danton, 
on whom the men of his section looked as the incarna- 
tion of the Revolution. To him Robespierre and his 
republic were shams, and to his club the club of the 
Jacobins was at first distinctly reactionary. It took 
but little time, in those fast-moving days, for the 
Cordeliers, in their turn, to be suspected for their un- 
patriotic moderation ! 

We must not leave our Cour du Commerce, without 
a glance at the small building on the northern corner of 
its entrance from Rue de I'Ancienne-Comedie. It was 
here that the first guillotine was set up for experiments 
on sheep, by Dr. Antoine Louis, Secretary of the Acad- 
emy of Surgeons, and the head of a committee ap- 
pointed by the National Assembly on October 6, 1791. 
On that day a clause in the new penal code made death 
by decapitation the only method of execution, and the 
committee had powers to construct the apparatus, 
which was to supersede Sanson's sword. It was not 
a new invention, for the mediaeval executioners of 
Germany and Scotland had toyed with " the Maiden," 
but for centuries she had lost her vogue. On Decem- 
ber I, 1789, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had tried to 
impress on the Assembly the need of humane modes 
of execution, and had dwelt on the comfort of decapi- 
tation by his apparatus until he was laughed down. 
That grim body could find mirth only in a really funny 
subject like the cutting off of heads ! After two years 
and more, the machine, perfected by Dr. Louis, and 



232 THE STONES OF PARIS 

popularly known as ''La Loiiisette," was tried on a 
malefactor in the Place de Greve on April 25, 1792. 
Three days later the little lady received her official 
title, '* La Guillotine." 

Dr. Guillotin had made his model and his experi- 
ments at his residence, still standing, with no external 
changes, at No. 21 Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs. It 
was already a most ancient mansion when he came 
here to live, and perhaps to remain until his death — 
in bed — in 18 14. It had been known as the Hotel de 
Bretagne, and it is rich in personal history. To its 
shelter came Catherine de Lorraine, the young widow 
of the Due de Montpensier, the '' lame little devil " 
whom Henri HI. longed to burn alive, for her abuse 
of him after the murder of her brother Guise. Within 
its walls, Anne of Austria's treasurer, the rich and 
vulgar Bertrand de la Baziniere — whom we have met 
on Quai Malaquais — hoarded the plunder which he 
would not, or dared not, spend. Louis XIV. gave him, 
later, lodgings in the Bastille, in that tower named 
Baziniere always after. In this same Hotel de Bre- 
tagne, Henrietta of France, widowed queen of Eng- 
land, made her temporary home in the winter of 1661, 
near her daughter, lately installed as " Madame," wife 
of the King's brother, in the Palais-RoyaL Return- 
ing from England in 1665, this unhappy queen went 
to the last refuge of her troubled life in the convent 
she had founded on the heights of Chaillot. From 
that farther window of the first story on the right of 
the court, the Comte de Maulevrier, Colbert's nephew, 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 233 

threw himself down to his death on the pavement on 
Good Friday, 1706. In time the stately mansion be- 
came a hotel-garni, was appropriated as National Do- 
main in the Revolution, and sold in a lottery. 

"' La Guillotine," having proved the sharpness of her 
tooth, was speedily promoted from Place de Greve to a 
larger stage in Place de la Reunion, now Place du Car- 
rousel, and thence in May, 1793 — that she might not 
be under the windows of the Convention — to Place de 
la Revolution, formerly Place de Louis XV., at pres- 
ent Place de la Concorde. This wide space, just be- 
yond the moat of the Tuileries gardens, had in its 
centre, where now is the obelisk of Luxor, a statue of 
the late " well-beloved," then altogether-detested, King 
for whom the place had been named; and a little to 
the east of that point the scaffold was set up. La- 
martine puts it on the site of the southern fountain, 
for the effect he gets of the flowing of water and of 
blood ; this is one of his magniloquent phrases, which 
scorn exactness. On January 21, 1793, for the execu- 
tion of Louis XVL, the guillotine was removed to a 
spot just westward of the centre, that it might be well 
protected by the troops deploying about the western 
side of the place, and into the Champs Elysees and 
Cours la Reine. For a while in 1794, the guillotine 
was transferred to the present Place de la Nation — 
where we shall find it in a later chapter — to come back 
to Place de la Revolution in time to greet Robespierre 
and his friends. 

Standing here, we are near the other centre of Revo- 



234 THE STONES OF PARIS 

lutionary Paris, made so by the Club of the Jacobins, 
that met first in the refectory, later in the church of the 
monastery from which it took its name. The site of 
these buildings is covered by the little Marche Saint- 
Honore and by the space about. The club of the more 
moderate men, headed by Bailly and Lafayette, had its 
quarters in the monastery of the Feuillants, which gave 
its name to the club, and which extended along the 
south side of Rue Saint-Honore, eastwardly from Rue 
de Castiglione ; this street being then the narrow Pas- 
sage des Feuillants, leading from Rue Saint-Honore to 
the royal gardens, and to the much-trodden Terrasse on 
the northern side of those gardens facing the Manege. 
This building had been erected for the equestrian edu- 
cation of the youth who afterward became Louis XV., 
and was converted into a hall for the sitting of the 
Assembly, after that body had been crowded for about 
three weeks, on coming to Paris from Versailles, into 
the inadequate hall of the Archbishop's palace, on the 
southern shore of the City Island, alongside Notre- 
Dame. The Convention took over the Manege from the 
Assembly, and there remained until May, 1793, when 
it removed to the more commodious quarters, and more 
befitting surroundings, of the Tuileries. The old rid- 
ing-school, whose site is marked by a tablet on the 
railing of the garden opposite No. 230 Rue de Rivoli, 
was swept away by the cutting of the western end of 
that street, under the Consulate in 1802. 

When Maximilien Robespierre came up from Arras 
— where he had resigned his functions in the Criminal 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 235 



Court, because of his conscientious objections to capital 
punishment — he found squalid quarters, suiting his 
purse — which remained empty all through life — in Rue 
Saintonge. That street, named for a province of old 
France, remains almost as he saw it, one of the few 
Paris streets that retain their original buildings and an- 
cient atmosphere. The high and sombre house, where- 
in he lodged from October, 1789, to July, 1791, is quite 
unaltered, save for its number, which was then 8 and is 
now 64. From here, Robespierre was snatched away, 
suddenly and without premeditation on his part, and 
planted in the bosom of the Duplay family. They had 
worshipped him from afar, and when, from their win- 
dows, they saw him surrounded by the acclaiming 
crowd, on the day after the so-called massacres of the 
Champ-de-Mars of July 17, 1791, the peaceful carpen- 
ter ran out and dragged the shrinking great man into 
his court-yard for temporary shelter. The house was 
then No. 366 Rue Saint-Honore. If any reader wishes 
to decide for himself whether the modern No. 398 is 
built on the site of the Duplay house, of which no stone 
is left, as M. Ernest Hamel asserts ; or whether the 
present tall structure there is an elevation on the walls 
of the old house, every stone of which is left, as M. 
Sardou insists ; he must study the pamphlets issued by 
these earnest and erudite controversialists. There is 
nothing more delightful in topographical sparring. 
The authors of this book can give no aid to the solicitous 
student ; for they have read all that has been written 
concerning the subject, they have explored the house, 



236 THE STONES OF PARIS 

and they have settled in silence in the opposing 
camps ! 

In the Duplay household, to which he brought misery 
then and afterward, Robespierre was worshipped dur- 
ing life and deified after death. To that misguided 
family, '' this cat's head, with the prominent cheek- 
bones, seamed by small-pox; his bilious complexion; 
his green eyes rimmed with red, behind blue spectacles ; 
his harsh voice ; his dry, pedantic, snappish, imperious 
language ; his disdainful carriage ; his convulsive gest- 
ures — all this was effaced, recast, and transformed into 
the gentle figure of an apostle and a martyr to his faith 
for the salvation of men." From their house, it was but 
a step to the sittings of the Assembly. It was but a few 
steps farther to the garden of the Tuileries and to the 
" jHe de I'Etre Supreme," planned by him, when he 
had induced the Convention to decree the existence of 
God and of an immortal soul in man. He cast himself 
for the role of High Priest of Heaven, and headed the 
procession on June 8, 1794, clad in a blue velvet coat, 
a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top-boots ; car- 
rying in his hand flowers and wheat-ears. He ad- 
dressed the crowd, in " the scraggiest prophetic dis- 
course ever uttered by man," and they had games, and 
burned in effigy Atheism and Selfishness and Vice ! 
Such of the stage-setting of this farce as was con- 
structed in stone remains intact to-day, for our wonder 
at such childishness, and our admiration of the archi- 
tectural perfection of the out-of-door arena. 

From this Duplay house, Robespierre used to go on 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 



237 



his solitary strolls, accompanied only by his dogs, in 
the woods of Monceaux and Montmorenci, where he 
picked wild-flowers. From this house he went to his 
last appearance in the Convention on the p Thermidor, 
and past it he was carted to the scaffold, on the follow- 
ing day, July 28, 1794. He had followed Danton with- 
in a few months, as Danton had predicted. They were 







The Carr^ d'Atalante in the Tuileries Gardens. 

of the same age at the time of their death, each having 
thirty-five years ; the younger Robespierre was thirty- 
two, Saint-Just was twenty-six, Desmoulins thirty- 
four, when their heads fell. Mirabeau died at the age 
of forty-two, Marat was forty-nine when stabbed. 
Not one of the conspicuous leaders of the Revolution 
and of the Terror had come to fifty years ! 

When the tumbrils and their burdens did not go along 
the quays to Place de la Revolution, they went through 
Rue Saint-Honore, that being the only thoroughfare on 



238 TITE STONES OF PARIS 

that side of the river. From the Conciergerie they 
crossed Pont au Change, and made their way by narrow 
and devious turnings to the eastern end of Rue Saint- 
. Honore, and through its length to Rue du Chemin- 
du-Rempart — now Rue Royale — and so to the scaffold. 
Short Rue Saint-Florentin was then Rue de I'Oran- 
gerie, and was crowded by sightseers hurrying to the 
place. Those of the victims not already confined in the 
Conciergerie were sent to the condemned cells there, for 
the night between sentence and execution. The trust- 
worthy history of the prisons of Paris during the Revo- 
lution remains to be written, and there is wealth of 
material for it. There were many smaller prisons not 
commonly known, and of the larger ones that we do 
know, there are several, quite unchanged to-day, well 
worth unofficial inspection. The Salpetriere, filling a 
vast space south of the Jardin des Plantes, was built 
for the manufacture of saltpetre, by Louis XIIL ; and, 
by his son, was converted into a branch, for women, 
of the General Hospital. A portion of its buildings 
was set apart for young women of bad character, and 
here Manon Lescaut was imprisoned. The great es- 
tablishment is now known as the Hopital de la Sal- 
petriere, and is famous for its treatment of women 
afflicted with nervous maladies, and with insanity. 
The present Hospice de la Maternite was also per- 
verted to prison usages during the Revolution. Its 
formal cloisters and steep tiled roofs cluster about its 
old-time square, but its ancient gardens, and their 
great trees, are almost all buried beneath new ma- 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 239 

sonry. The fagade of the chapel, the work of Le- 
pautre, is no longer used as the entrance, and may be 
seen over the wall on Boulevard de Port-Royal. An- 
other prison was that of Saint-Lazare, first a lazar- 
house and then a convent, whose weather-worn roofs 
and dormers show above the wall on Rue du Faubourg- 
Saint-Denis. On the dingy yellow plaster of the arched 
entrance-gate one may read, in thick black letters: 
" Maison d' Arret et de Correction.'' Unaltered, too, 
is the prison in the grounds of the Carmelites, to be 
visited later in company with Dumas; and the Lux- 
embourg, that was reserved for choice captives. The 
prison of the Abbey of Saint-Germain was swept away 
by the boulevard of that name. Its main entrance 
for wheeled vehicles was through Rue Sainte-Mar- 
guerite, the short section left of that street being now 
named Gozlin. Of the other buildings of the abbey, 
there remain only the church itself, the bishop's pal- 
ace behind in Rue de I'Abbaye, and the presbytery 
glued to the southern side of the church-porch. Its 
windows saw the massacres of the priests and the 
prisoners, which took place on the steps of the church 
and in its front court. When you walk from those 
steps across the open place, to take the tram for Fon- 
tenay-aux-Roses, you step above soil that was soaked 
with blood in the early days of September, 1792. 
Some few of the abbey prisoners were slaughtered in 
the garden, of which a portion remains on the south 
side of the church, where the statue of Bernard Palissy, 
by Barrias, stands now. In other chapters, the destruc- 



240 THE STONES OF PARIS 

tion of the Grand- and the Petit-Chatelet has been 
noted. La Force has gone, and Sainte-Pelagie is soon 
to go. And the Conciergerie has been altered, almost 
beyond recognition, as to its entrances and its courts 
and its cells. Only the Cour des Femmes remains at 
all as it was in those days. 

There are three victims of the Terror who have had 
the unstinted pity of later generations, and who have 
happily left traces of their presence on Paris brick and 
mortar. The last of these three to die was Andre- 
Marie de Chenier, and we will go first to his dwelling. 
It is an oddly shaped house. No. 97 Rue de Clery — 
Corneille's street for many years — at its junction with 
Rue Beauregard; and a tablet in its wall tells of de 
Chenier's residence there. Born in Constantinople in 
1762, of a French father — a man of genius in mercantile 
affairs — and a Greek mother, the boy was brought to 
Paris with his younger brother, Joseph-Marie, in 1767. 
They lived with their mother in various streets in 
the Marais, before settling in this final home. Here 
Madame de Chenier, a poet and artist in spirit, filled the 
rooms with the poets and artists and savants of the 
time, the friends of her gifted sons. Hither came Da- 
vid, gross of body, his active mind busied with schemes 
for his annual exhibitions of paintings, the continuation 
of those begun by Colbert, and the progenitor of the 
present Salons; Alfieri, the poet and splendid advent- 
urer; Lavoisier, absorbed in chemical discovery. 
Here in his earlier years, and later, when he hurried 
home from the French Embassy in London on the out- 



THE PARTS OF THE REVOLUTION 241 



break of the Revolution, Andre de Chenier produced 
the verse that revived the love of nature, dead in France 
since Ronsard, and brought a lyric freshness to poetry 
that shamed the dry artificialities so long in vogue. 
That poetry was the forerunner of the Romantic move- 
ment. In his tranquil soul, he hoped for the pacific 
triumph of liberty and equality, and his delicate spirit 
abhorred the excesses of the party with whose prin- 
ciples he sympathized. He was taken into custody at 
Passy, early in 1794, while visiting a lady, against 
whose arrest he had struggled, locked up in Saint- 
Lazare for months, convicted, and sent to the Con- 
ciergerie. He was guillotined in Place de la Nation 
on July 26, 1794, only the day before Robespierre's 
fall, and was one of the last and noblest sacrifices to 
the Terror. We shall look on his burial-place in our 
later rambles. Miiller has made Andre de Chenier the 
central figure of his " Roll-Call," now in the Louvre. 
He sits looking toward us with eyes that see visions, 
and his expression seems full of the thought to which 
he gave utterance when led out to execution : " I have 
done nothing for posterity, and yet," tapping his fore- 
head, " I had something here ! " 

In 1795 this little house was surrounded by a great 
crowd of citizens come to bury Louis de Chenier, the 
father. The Section of Brutus guarded the bier, draped 
with blue set with silver stars, to suggest the immor- 
tality of the soul ! And they gave every honor they 
could invent to the "' Pompe funehre d'un Citoyen Ver- 
tueux/' whose worthy son they had beheaded. 



242 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Joseph-Marie de Chenier lived for many years under 
suspicion of having given his assent if not his aid to his 
brother's death, albeit the mother always asserted that 
he had tried to save Andre. Joseph was a fiery patriot, 
and a man of genius withal. He wrote the words of 
the '' Chant du Depart " which, set to music by Mehul, 
proved almost as stirring as the " Marseillaise " to the 
pulses of the Patriots. Music was one of the potent in- 
toxicants of the time, and the Revolution was played 
and sung along to the strains of these two airs, and 
of '' Ca ira " and the " Carmagnole." The classic style, 
which had hitherto prevailed, gave way before the pal- 
try sentimentality and the tinkling bombast of the music 
adored by the mob. David planned processions march- 
ing to patriotic airs, and shallow operas were performed 
in the streets. Yet Rouget de Lisle, the captain of 
engineers who had given them the '' Marseillaise," was 
cashiered and put into a cell ; being freed, he was left 
to starve, and no aid came to him from the Empire or 
the Bourbons, naturally enough. Louis-Philippe's gov- 
ernment found him in sad straits, in that poor house 
No. 21 of the poor Passage Saulnier, and ordered a 
small pension to be paid to him during his life. His 
death came in 1836. 

Joseph-Marie de Chenier was a playwright, also, and 
in 1789 he had created a sensation by his *' Charles 
IX.," produced at the Comedie Frangaise, now the 
Odeon. In the part of the King, wonderfully made 
up and costumed, Talma won his first notable triumph. 
'' This play," cried Danton from the pit, " will kill 



THE PARIS Oh THE REVOLUTION- 243 



royalty as ' Figaro ' killed the nobility." Joseph-Marie 
lived, not too reputably, but very busily, until January 
10, 181 1 ; a fussy politician, a member of the Conven- 
tion, of the Council of Five Hundred, and of the Insti- 
tute, Section of the French Tongue and Literature, al- 
ways detested by his associates, by the Emperor, and by 
the common people. 

When the Place Dauphine of Henri IV. was finished, 
the new industry of the spectacle-makers established 
itself in the same buildings we see to-day, and gave to 
the place the name of Quai des Lunettes. Later came 
the engravers, who found all the light they needed in 
these rooms, open on three sides. Among them was a 
master-engraver, one Phlipon, bringing his daughter, 
Marie-Jeanne — her pet name being Manon — from the 
house of her birth, in 1754, in Rue de la Lanterne, now 
widened into Rue de la Cite. It is not known whether 
the site of that house is under the Hotel-Dieu or the 
Marche-aux-Fleurs. Their new home stood, and still 
stands, on the corner of the northern quay, and is now 
numbered 28 Place Dauphine and 41 Quai de I'Hor- 
loge. The small window of the second floor lights the 
child's alcove bedroom, where this " daughter of the 
Seine " — so Madame Roland dubs herself in her " Me- 
moirs " — looked out on the river, and up at the sky, 
from over Pont au Change to beyond the heights of 
Chaillot, when she could lift her eyes from her Plu- 
tarch, and her thoughts from the altar she was planning 
to raise to Rousseau. It must be owned that this all 
too-serious girl was a prig; a creature over- fed for its 



244 ^-^^ STONES OF PARIS 

size, the word has been happily defined. At the age of 
eleven, she was sent to the school of the '' Dames de la 
Congregation," in the Augustinian convent in Rue 
Neuve-Saint-Etienne. It has been told how that an- 
cient street was cut in half by Rue Monge. In its east- 
ern section, now named Rue de Navarre, was Manon's 
school, directly above the Roman amphitheatre, dis- 
covered only of late years in the course of excavations 
in this quarter. The portion that is left of this impres- 
sive relic is in good preservation and in good keeping. 
Her school-days done, the girl spent several years in 
this house before us, until her mother's death, and her 
father's tipsiness, sent her back to her convent for a few 
months. Then, having refused the many suitors who 
had thronged about her in her own home, she found 
the philosopher she wanted for a husband in Jean- 
Marie Roland de la Platriere, a man much older than 
she ; lank, angular, yellow, bald, " rather respectable 
than seductive," in the words of the girl-friend who 
had introduced him. But Manon Phlipon doubtless 
idealized this wooden formalist who adored her, as she 
idealized herself and all her surroundings, including 
The People, who turned and rent her at the last. She 
gave to her husband duty and loyalty, and it was not 
until she counted herself dead to earth and its tempta- 
tions, in her cell at Sainte-Pelagie, that she addressed 
her last farewell to him, whom '' I dare not name, one 
whom the most terrible of passions has not kept from 
respecting the barriers of virtue." This farewell was 
meant for Franqois-Leonard-Nicolas Buzot, Girondist 






i \ -T"*a' 



TZ3A-. 






, " 




The Girlhood Home of Madame Roland. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 245 



member of the Assembly and later of the Convention. 
He remained unnamed and unknown, until his name 
and their secret were told by a bundle of old letters, 
found on a book-stall on Quai Voltaire in 1864. She 
had met him first when her husband came from Lyons, 
with petitions to the Assembly, in February, 1791, and 
took rooms at the Hotel Britannique, in Rue Guene- 
gaud. Her salon soon became the gathering-place of 
the Girondists, where those austere men, who consid- 
ered themselves the sole salvation of France, were 
austerely regaled with a bowl of sugar and a carafe of 
water. Their hostess could not bother with frivolities, 
she, who in her deadly earnestness, renounced the the- 
atre and pictures, and all the foolish graces of life ! 
The Hotel Britannique was the house now numbered 
12 Rue Guenegaud, a wide-fronted, many-windowed 
mansion of the eighteenth century. Its stone steps 
within are well worn, its iron rail is good, its second 
floor — the Roland apartment — still shows traces of the 
ancient decorations. 

Buzot lived at No. 3 Quai Malaquais, an ancient 
mansion now replaced by the modern structure be- 
tween the seventeenth-century houses numbered i and 
5. For when the Convention outlawed the Girondists, 
and Buzot fled, it was decreed that his dwelling should 
be levelled to the ground, and on its site should be 
placed a notice : '' La fut la maison du roi Buzot." So 
that it would seem that his colleagues of the Conven- 
tion had found him an insufferably Superior Person. 

Leaving this apartment on his appointment to office 



246 THE STONES OF PARIS 

in 1792, Roland took his wife to the gorgeous salons 
of the Ministry of the Interior, in the hotel built by 
Leveau for the Comte de Lionne, and beautified later by 
Calonne. It occupied the site of the present annex of 
the Bank of France just off Rue des Petits-Champs, 
between Rues Marsollier and Dalayrac. Here, during 
his two terms of office in 1792 and 1793, Roland had the 
aid of his wife's pen, as well as the allurements of her 
personal influence, in the cause to which she had de- 
voted herself. The masculine strength of her pen was 
weakened, it is true, by too sharp a feminine point, and 
she embittered the Court, the Cordeliers, the Jacobins, 
all equally against her and her party. For " this woman 
who was a great man," in Louis Blanc's true words, 
was as essentially womanly as was Marie Antoinette ; 
and these two most gracious and pathetic figures of 
their time were yet unconscious workers for evil to 
France. The Queen made impassable the breach be- 
tween the throne and the people ; Madame Roland has- 
tened on the Terror. And each of them was doing ex- 
actly what she thought it right to do ! 

On January 23, 1793, two days after the King's 
death, Roland left office forever and removed to a house 
in Rue de la Harpe, opposite the Church of Saint- 
Cosme. That church stood on the triangle made by the 
meeting of Rues de I'Ecole-de-Medecine and Racine 
with Boulevard Saint-Michel. On the eastern side of 
that boulevard, once the eastern side of Rue de la 
Harpe, where it meets modern Rue des Ecoles, stood 
the Roland house. The students and studentesses, who 



TttE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION Ul 



sip their coffee and beer on the pavement of Vachette's, 
are on the scene of Madame Roland's arrest, on the 
night between May 31st and June ist. On the former 
day, seeing the end so near, Roland had fled. His wife 
was taken to the prison of the Abbaye, and given the cell 
which was to be tenanted, six weeks later, by Charlotte 
Corday. Released on June 22d and returned to her 
home in Rue de laHarpe, she was re-arrested on the 24th 
and locked up in Sainte-Pelagie. It was an old prison, 
long kept for the detention of '' femmes et filles, dont la 
conduite est onereuse," and its character had not been 
bettered by the character of the female prisoners sent 
there by the Terror. This high-minded woman, sub- 
jected to infamous sights and sounds, preserved her 
serenity and fortitude in a way to extort the " stupe- 
fied admiration " of her fellow-prisoners, as one of 
these has testified. It was only in her cell that the great 
heart gave way. There she found solace, during her 
four months' confinement, with Thomson's " Seasons," 
" done into choice French," with Shaftesbury and an 
English dictionary, with Tacitus, and her girlhood 
companion, Plutarch. And here she busied herself with 
her " Memoirs," *' writing under the axe," in her own 
phrase. In the solitude of her cell, indeed, she was 
sometimes disturbed by the unseemly laughter of the 
ladies of the Comedie Frangaise, at supper with the 
prison-governor in an adjacent cell. We shall see, 
later, how these ladies came to be here. More accept- 
able sounds might have come almost to her ears ; that 
of the hymn-singing or of the maiden laughter of the 



248 THE STONES OF PARIS 

girls in her old convent, only a few steps away. The 
prison-register contains her description, probably as 
accurate as matter-of-fact : " Height, five feet ; hair 
and eyebrows, dark chestnut ; brown eyes ; medium 
nose ; ordinary mouth ; oval face, round chin, high 
forehead." From Sainte-Pelagie she went to the Con- 
ciergerie on November ist, the day after the guillotin- 
ing of the Girondists, and thence in eight days to her 
own death. It has been told, by every writer, that she 
could look over at her girlhood home, as her tumbril 
crossed Pont au Change. It has not been told, so 
plainly as it deserves, that her famous utterance on the 
platform was made fine for historic purposes, as was 
done with Cambronne's magnificent monosyllable at 
Waterloo. She really said : '* O Liherte, comme on fa 
jouee!" With these words, natural and spontaneous 
and without pose, she is, indeed, *' beautiful, amazonian, 
graceful to the eye, more so to the mind." 

Within a few days of her death died her husband 
and her lover. Roland, on hearing of her execution, 
in his hiding-place near Rouen, thrust his cane-sword 
into his breast ; Buzot, wandering and starving in the 
fields, was found half-eaten by wolves. She had con- 
fided her daughter Eudora and her " Memoirs " to the 
loyal friend Bosc, who hid the manuscript in the forest 
of Montmorenci, and in 1795 published it for the daugh- 
ter's benefit. The original is said to be in existence, on 
coarse gray paper, stained with her tears. Sainte- 
Beuve speaks of them as " delicious and indispensable 
memories," deserving a place " beside the most sub- 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTIOJST 249 



lime and eloquent effusions of a brave yet tender philos- 
ophy." When he praises that style, clearer and more 
concise than that of Madame de Stael, " that other 
daughter of Rousseau," he does not say all ; he might 
have added that, like Rousseau, she occasionally speaks 
of matters not quite convenient to hear. 

It is difficult to refrain from undue admiration and 
pity, to remain temperate and modest, when one dwells 
on the character and qualities, the blameless life and 
the ignominious death, of Marie- Jean-Antoine-Nicolas 
Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. We may look up at his 
thoughtful face in bronze on Quai Conti, alongside the 
Mint, where he lived in the entresol of the just com- 
pleted building, when appointed Director of the Hotel 
de la Monnaie by his old friend Turgot, in 1774. We 
may look upon the house in Rue Servandoni where he 
hid, and from which he escaped to his death. His other 
Paris homes have no existence now. His college of 
Navarre — oldest of all those in the University — has 
been made over into the Ecole Polytechnique ; and the 
house he built for himself in Rue Chantereine, which 
was afterward owned by Josephine Beauharnais, has 
long since disappeared. When only twenty-two years 
of age he wrote his famous essay on the Integral Cal- 
culus, when twenty-six he was elected to the Academy 
of Sciences. Made Perpetual Secretary of that body 
in 1777, it came in the course of his duties to deliver 
eulogies on Pascal, d'Alembert, Buffon, and Franklin, 
and others of the great guild of science. These are 
more than perfunctory official utterances, they are of 



250 fHE STONES OF PARIS 

an eloquence that shows his lovable character as well 
as his scientific authority. He contributed largely to 
Diderot's Encyclopaedia, and put forth many astronom- 
ical, mathematical, and theological treatises during his 
busy life. He wrote earnestly in favor of the inde- 
pendence of the American colonies, and was one of the 
earliest advocates of the people's cause in France. But 
he was much more than a man of science and of let- 
ters ; he was a man with a great soul, '' the Seneca of 
the modern school," says Lamartine ; the most kindly 
and tolerant friend of humanity, and protector of its 
rights, since Socrates. He believed in the indefinite 
perfectibility of the human race, and he wrote his last 
essay, proving its progress upward, while hiding in a 
garret from those not yet quite perfect fellow-beings, 
who were howling for his head ! He was beloved by 
Benjamin Franklin and by Thomas Paine. Members 
of the Convention together, he and Paine prepared the 
new Constitution of 1793, in which political document 
they found no place for theological dogma. Robes- 
pierre prevented the adoption of this Constitution, hav- 
ing taken God under his own protection. Condorcet 
made uncompromising criticism, and was put on the 
list of those to be suspected and got rid of. Too broad 
to ally himself with the Girondists, he was yet pro- 
scribed with them, on June 2, 1793. His friends had 
forced him to go into hiding, until he might escape. 
They had asked Madame Vernet — widow of the paint- 
er Claude- Joseph, mother of Carle, grandmother of 
Horace — to give shelter to one of the proscribed, and 



THE PARIS OP THE REVOLUTION 25I 

she had asked only if he were an honest man. This 
loyal woman concealed him in her garret for nearly 
one year, and would have kept him longer, but that he 
feared for her safety, and for that of his wife and 
daughter, who might be tracked in their visits to him 
by night. He had finished his " Esquisse d'un Tableau 
historique des Progres de TEsprit humain," full of hope 
for humanity, with no word of reproach or repining, 
and then he wrote his last words : '' Advice of one pro- 
scribed, to his Daughter." This is to be read to-day 
for its lofty spirit. He gives her the names of certain 
good men who will befriend her, and among them is 
Benjamin Franklin Bache, the son of our Franklin's 
daughter Sally, who had been in Paris with his grand- 
father. 

Then, this letter finished, early on the morning of 
April 5, 1794, he left it on his table and slipped out, 
unseen by the good widow Vernet, from the three- 
storied plaster-fronted house now No. 15 of Rue Ser- 
vandoni, and still unaltered, as is almost the entire 
street. Through it he hurried to Rue de Vaugirard, 
where he stood undecided for a moment, the prison of 
the Luxembourg on his left, and the prison of the 
Carmelites on his right, both full of his friends. And 
on the walls, all about, were placards with big-lettered 
warning that death was the penalty for harboring the 
proscribed. Here at the corner, he ran against one Sar- 
ret, cousin of Madame Vernet, who went with him, 
showing the way through narrow streets to the Bar- 
riere du Maine, which was behind the present station 



252 THE STONES OF PARIS 

of Mont-Parnasse. Safely out of the town, the two 
men took the road to Fontenay-aux-Roses, and at 
night Sarret turned back. Condorcet lost his way, 
and wandered about the fields for two days, sleeping 
in the quarries of Clamart, until driven by hunger 
into a wretched inn. Demanding an omelet, he was 
asked how many eggs he would have; the ignorant- 
learned man ordered a dozen, too many for the work- 
ing-man he was personating, and suspicions were 
aroused. The villagers bound and dragged him to 
the nearest guardhouse at Bourg-la-Reine. He died 
in his cell that night, April 7, 1794, by poison, it is be- 
lieved. For he wore a ring containing poison ; the 
same sort of poison, it is said, that was carried by Napo- 
leon, with which he tried — or pretended to try — to kill 
himself at Fontainebleau. In the modern village of 
Bourg-la-Reine, five and a half miles from Paris, the 
principal square bears the name of Condorcet, and holds 
his bust in marble. 

" La Veuve Condorcet " appears in the Paris Bottin 
every year until 1822, when she died. She had been 
imprisoned on the identification of her husband's body, 
but was released after Robespierre's death. She passed 
the Duplay house every day during those years, going 
to her little shop at 232 Rue Saint-Honore. There she 
had set up a linen business on the ground floor, and 
above, she painted portraits in a small way. She was a 
woman of rare beauty and of fine mind, with all wom- 
anly graces and all womanly courage. Married in 1786, 
and much younger than her husband, timorous before 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 253 

his real age and his seeming austerity, she had grown 
up to him, and had learned to love that " volcano cov- 
ered with snow," as his friend d'Alembert had said he 
was. She had a pretty gift with her pen, and her trans- 
lation into French of Adam Smith's '* Theory of Moral 
Sentiments "is still extant. Her little salon came to be 
greatly frequented in her beautiful old age. 

Condorcet's famous fellow-worker in science, An- 
toine-Laurent Lavoisier, was guillotined in May, 1794, 
the two men having the same number of years, fifty- 
one. He was condemned, not for being a chemist, albeit 
his enlightened judges were of the opinion that " the 
Republic has no need of chemists," but because he had 
filled, with justice and honesty, his office of Farmer- 
General under royalty. Their contemporaries of near- 
ly equal age, Gaspard Monge and Claude-Louis Ber- 
thoUet, escaped the guillotine, and were among the 
savants in the train of General Bonaparte in his Italian 
and Egyptian campaigns. After many years of use- 
ful labors, they died peacefully under the Restora- 
tion. 

Pierre-Simon Laplace, of almost equal years with 
these four, lived to a greater age, and received higher 
honors from the Emperor and the Bourbons. Coming 
from his birth-place in Calvados in 1767, his first Paris 
home to be found is in Rue des Noyers ; one side of 
which ancient street now forms that southern section 
of Boulevard Saint-Germain opposite Rue des Anglais, 
its battered houses seeming to shrink back from the 
publicity thrust upon them. In that one now numbered 



254 THE STONES OF PARIS 

57 in the boulevard, formerly No. 33 Rue des Noyers, 
Alfred de Musset was born in 1810; and in the same 
row lived Laplace in 1777. In 1787 we find him in Rue 
Mazarine, and in 1790 in Rue Louis-le-Grand, and this 
latter residence represents his only desertion of the 
University side of the Seine. He returned to that bank 
when placed by the Consuls in the Senate, and made his 
home in 1801 at No. 24 Rue des Grands-Augustins, and 
in the following year at No. 2 Rue Christine. These 
stately mansions of that period, only a step apart, remain 
as he left them. When Laplace was made Chancellor 
of the Senate, in 1805, his official residence was in the 
Luxembourg, and there it continued until 181 5, the year 
of the Restoration. His private residence, from 1805 
to 1809, was at No. 6 Rue de Tournon, a house still 
standing in all its senatorial respectability. He gave 
this up, and again took up his quarters in the Luxem- 
bourg, when made a Count of the Empire and Vice- 
President of the Senate. 

From the Medician palace, which appears in the BoU 
tin of those years as simple No. 19 Rue de Vaugirard, 
Laplace removed to No. 51 of that street, when the re- 
turned Bourbons made him a Peer of France. This 
house, near Rue d'Assas — named for the Chevalier 
Nicolas d'Assas, the heroic captain of the regiment of 
Auvergne during the Seven Years' War — is unaltered 
since his time. His last change of abode was made in 
1818, to Rue du Bac, 100, where he died in 1827. It is a 
mansion of old-fashioned dignity, with a large court in 
front and a larger garden behind, and is now numbered 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 255 



108. The growing importance of his successive dwell- 
ings, every one of which may be visited to-day, mark 
his growth in importance as a man of state. The 
growth of the man of science is represented by his 
colossal " La Mecanique Celeste," which first appeared 
in 1799, and was continued by successive volumes until 
its completion in 1825. Its title, rather than his titles, 
should be inscribed on his monument. 

A little later than these famous confreres, Georges 
Cuvier appears in Paris — in Hugo's half-truth — " with 
one eye on the book of Genesis and the other on nature, 
endeavoring to please bigoted reaction by reconciling 
fossils with texts, and making the mastodons support 
Moses." His first home, at the present 40 Rue de 
Seine, is a fine old-fashioned mansion. He removed to 
the opposite side of that street in 1810, and there re- 
mained until 1816, his house being now replaced by 
the new and characterless structure at No. 35. Full of 
character, however, i^ his official residence as Professor 
in the Jardin des Plantes, which took again its ancient 
title of Jardin du Roi during the Restoration. " La 
Maison de Cuvier" is a charming old building near 
the garden-entrance in Rue Cuvier, and within is the 
bust of this most gifted teacher of his time. His genu- 
ine devotion to science and his tolerance for all policies 
carried him through the several changes of government 
during his life. He completed the Napoleonic con- 
quest of Italy and Holland by his introduction of the 
French methods of education, perfected by him. The 
Bourbons made him Baron and Chancellor of the Uni- 



256 THE STONES OF PARIS 



versity, and the Orleans king elevated him to the Peer- 
age of France. He died in 1832. 

Paul-Franqois-Jean-Nicolas, Comte de Barras — sol- 
dier, adventurer, a power in the Convention, the power 
of the Directory, practically dictator for a while — has 
added to the hilarity of the sceptical student of history 
by his '' Memoirs," kept concealed since his death, in 
1829, until their publication within a few years. Splen- 
didly mendacious in these pages as he was in life, Barras 
posed always as the man on horseback of his " ij 
Vendemiaire." On that day, unwittingly yet actually, 
he put into the saddle — where he stayed — his young 
friend Buonaparte, whose qualities he had discovered 
at the siege of Toulon. This artillery officer, while 
planting his batteries to cover every approach to the 
Tuileries, where cowered the frightened Convention, 
took personal command of the guns that faced Saint- 
Roch. The front of that church still shows the scars of 
the bullets that stopped the rush of the Sections in that 
direction. This battery was placed at the Rue Saint- 
Honore end of the narrow lane leading from that street 
to the gardens of the Tuileries — there being then no 
Rue de Rivoli, you will bear in mind. This lane was 
known as Rue du Dauphin, because of the royal son 
who had used it, going between the Tuileries and the 
church ; after that day, it was popularly called Rue du 
13-Vendemiaire, until it received its official appellation 
of Rue Saint-Roch, when widened and aligned in 1807. 
At this time there were only two houses in the street, 
near its southern end, and one of them was a hotel- 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION- 257 

garni, in which young Buonaparte caught a short sleep 
on that night of October 5, 1795. The oldest struct- 
ure in Rue Saint-Roch to-day is that with the two num- 
bers 4 and 6, and it is known to have been already a 
hotel-garni in the first years of the nineteenth century, 
when it was refaced. So that it is well within belief that 
we have found here Buonaparte's head-quarters for 
that one night. 

Let us now, crossing the river, get on the ground of 
positive proof, safe from doubts or conjectures. The 
Duchesse d'Abrantes, wife of that adorable ruffian, 
Andoche Junot, made a duke in 1807 by the Emperor, 
writes in her " Memoirs " : '* To this day, whenever I 
pass along Quai Conti, I cannot help looking up at the 
garret windows at the left angle of the house, on the 
third floor. That was Napoleon's chamber, when he 
paid us a visit; and a neat little room it was. My 
brother used to occupy the one next it." Madame 
Junot had been Mile. Laure Permon, whose father, an 
army contractor, had brought his family to Paris early 
in 1785, and leased for his residence the Hotel Sillery, 
formerly the Petit Hotel Guenegaud. Madame Per- 
mon, a Corsican lady, had been an early friend of Ma- 
dame Buonaparte, and had rocked young Buonaparte 
in his cradle ; so that he was called by his first name in 
her family, as her daughter shows in this quotation. 
Finding him at the Ecole Royale Militaire in Paris, she 
invited him to her house for frequent visits, once for a 
week's stay, whenever permission could be got from 
the school authorities. He was a lank, cadaverous, dis- 



258 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



bevelled lad, solitary, taciturn, and morose; brooding- 
over tbe poverty tbat bad forced bim to seek an unpaid- 




No. 13 Quai Conti. 



for scbolarsbip, and not readily making friends with the 
more fortunate Albert Permon. Yet be came often, and 
was nowhere so content as in this bouse before us. It 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 259 

stands far back from the front of the quay, half-hidden 
between the Institute and the Mint, and is numbered 13 
Quai Conti, and its entrance is on the side at No. 2 
Impasse Conti. Its upper portion is now occupied by a 
club of American art students. Constructed by Man- 
sart, its rooms are of admirable loftiness and propor- 
tion, and retain much of their sixteenth-century decora- 
tion. Here in this salon after dinner, young Buona- 
parte would storm about the '' indecent luxury " of 
his schoolmates, or sit listening to Madame Permon, 
soothed by her reminiscent prattle about Corsica and 
his mother, to whom he always referred as Madame 
Letitia. Here he first showed himself to the daugh- 
ters in his new sub-lieutenant's uniform, before join- 
ing his regiment on October 30, 1785, and they laughed 
at his thin legs in their big boots. 

The Ecole Superieure de Guerre, commonly called 
the " Ecole Militaire," remains nearly as when con- 
structed under Louis XV., but it is impossible to fix on 
the room allotted to this student during his year there 
— a small, bare room, with an iron cot, one wooden 
chair, and a wash-stand with drawers. The chapel, 
now unused, remains just as it was when he received 
his confirmation in it. He arrived at this school, from 
his preparatory school at Brienne, on the evening of 
October 19, 1784, one of a troop of five lads in the 
charge of a priest. They had disembarked, late that 
afternoon, at Port Saint-Paul, from the huge, clumsy 
boat that brought freight and passengers, twice a week, 
from Burgundy and the Aube down the Seine. The 



26o THE STONES OF PARIS 

priest gave the lads a simple dinner near their landing- 
place, and led them across the river and along the 
southern quays — where the penniless young Buona- 
parte bought a " Gil-Bias " from a stall, and a comrade 
in funds paid for it — and, stopping for prayers at Saint- 
Germain-des-Pres, he handed them over to the school 
authorities. 

From that moment every hour of young Buona- 
parte's year in Paris can be accounted for. And no 
foundation can be discovered or invented for the fable, 
mendaciously upheld by the tablet, placed by the Sec- 
ond Empire in the hallway of No. 5 Quai Conti, which 
claims a garret in that tall, up-climbing, old house as 
his lodging at that time or at any later time. This 
flimsy legend need no longer be listened to. Not far 
away, however, is a garret that did harbor the sub- 
lieutenant in the autumn of 1787. It is to M. Lenotre 
that we owe this delightful find. Arriving in Paris 
from Corsica, after exactly two years of absence, 
Buonaparte took room No. 9, on the third floor of 
the Hotel de Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honore. 
That street is now Rue Vauvilliers, its eastern side 
taken up by the Halles, and its present No. 33, on 
the western side, is the former hotel-garni, quite un- 
changed as to its fabric. Here he was always writ- 
ing in his room, going out only for the frugal meals 
that cost him a few sous^ and here he had his first 
amorous adventure, recited by him in cynical detail 
under the date: '' Jeudi 22 Novembre iy^7, a Paris, 
Hotel de Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honore." 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 261 

On August 10, 1792, Buonaparte saw the mob carry 
and sack the Tuileries. He was in disgrace with the 
army authorities, having practically deserted to Cor- 
sica, and he had come back for reinstatement and a 
job. In his Saint-Helena *' Memorial," he says that 
he was then lodging at the Hotel de Metz in Rue du 
Mail. This is evidently the same lodging placed by 
many writers in Rue d'Aboukir, for many of the large 
houses that fronted on the first-named street extended 
through to the latter, as shall be shown later. The 
hotel is gone, and the great mercantile establishment 
at No. 22 Rue du Mail covers its site. 

Gone, too, is the shabbily furnished little villa in 
Rue Chantereine, where he first called on Josephine 
de Beauharnais, where he married that faded coquette 
— dropping the u from his name then, in March, 1796 
— and whence he went to his 18 Brumaire. The court- 
yard, filled with resplendent officers on that morning, 
is now divided between the two courts numbered 58 
and 60 Rue de la Victoire; that name having been 
officially granted to the street, on his return from his 
Italian campaign in 1797. The villa, kept by the Em- 
peror, and lent at times to some favorite general, was 
not entirely torn down until i860. Its site is now 
covered by the houses Nos. 58 and 60. 

Rue Chantereine was, in those days, almost a coun- 
try road, bordered by small villas ; two of them were 
associated with Napoleon Bonaparte. In one of them. 
Mile. Eleonora Dennelle gave birth, on December 
13, 1806, to a boy, who grew up into a startling 



262 THE STONES OF PARIS 

likeness of the Emperor, as to face and figure, but 
who inherited from him only the half-madness of 
genius. He lived through the Empire, the Restora- 
tion, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and 
into the Republic that has come to stay, dying on 
April 15, 1881. To another modest dwelling in this 
same street, there came the loving and devoted Polish 
lady, Madame Walewska, who had thrown herself in- 
to the Emperor's arms, when she was full of faith in 
his intent to liberate her native land. Their son, Alex- 
andre Walewski, born in 1810, was a brilliant figure 
in Paris, where he came to reside after the fall of War- 
saw. A gifted soldier, diplomat, and writer, he died 
in 1868. 

So, of the roofs that sheltered the boyhood of Na- 
poleon, three still remain. Of those loftier roofs that 
sheltered his manhood, there are also three still to be 
seen. In the Paris Bottin of the first year of the nine- 
teenth century, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte ap- 
pears as a member of the Institute, Section of Mechan- 
ism, living in the palace of the Luxembourg. In 1805 
his address is changed to the palace of the Tuileries, 
and he is qualified '* Emperor of the French ; " enlarg- 
ing that title in 1806 to " Emperor of the French and 
King." The Tuileries are swept away, and Saint- 
Cloud has left only a scar. The Luxembourg remains, 
and so, too, the Palais de I'Elysee, where he resided 
for a while, and the chateau of Malmaison has been 
restored and refurnished in the style of Josephine, as 
near as may be, and filled with souvenirs of her and of 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION' 263 

her husband. Her body lies, with that of her daugh- 
ter Hortense, in the church of the nearest village, 
Reuil, and his remains rest under the dome of the 
Invalides — his last roof. 

There is a curious letter, said to be still in existence, 
written by young Buonaparte to Talma, asking for 
the loan of a few francs, to be repaid " out of the first 
kingdom I conquer." He goes on to say that he has 
found nothing to do, that Barras promises much and 
does little, and that the writer is at the end of his 
resources and his patience. This letter was evidently 
written at that poverty-stricken period between 1792 
and 1795, when he was idly tramping Paris streets 
with Junot, the lovable and generous comrade from 
Toulon ; or with Bourrienne, now met first since their 
school-days at Brienne, who was to become the Em- 
peror's patient confidential secretary. At that period 
Talma had fought his way to his own throne. Inti- 
mate as he had been with Mirabeau, Danton, Des- 
moulins, Joseph-Marie de Chenier and David, he had, 
also, made friends with the Corsican officer, either 
during these years of the letter or probably earlier. 
He made him free of the stage of the Theatre Fran- 
gais, and lent him books. His friendship passed on to 
the general, the Consul, and the Emperor, and it was 
gossipped that he had taught Bonaparte to dress and 
walk and play Napoleon. Talma always denied this, 
avowing that the other man was, by nature and train- 
ing, the greater actor! 

Joseph-Frangois Talma used to say that he first 



264 ^^^^ STONES OF PARIS 

heard of a theatre, from seeing and asking about the 
old Theatre de I'Hotel de Bourgogne, whose entrance 
was in Rue Mauconseil, opposite the place of his birth, 
on January 15, 1763. As he grew up he learned a 
good deal more about the theatre, for he went early 
and often. He was only fifteen when he was one of 
the audience in the Theatre Frangais, on that night of 
the crowning of Voltaire, and one of the crowd that 
tried to unharness the horses, and drag the old man 
from the Tuileries to his house on the quay. By day 
the lad was learning dentistry, his father's profession 
— it was then a trade — and the two went to London to 
practice. For a while young Talma got experience in 
that specialty from the jaws of the sailor-men at 
Greenwich, and got gayer and more congenial experi- 
ence in amateur theatricals in town. They returned 
to Paris, and the father's sign, "" M. Talma, Dentiste/' 
was hung by the doorway of No. 3 Rue Jean-Jacques- 
Rousseau, next to the corner of Rue Saint-Honore. 
From the house that was there before the present mod- 
ern structure, young Talma went across the river to 
the Comedie Frangaise, on the night of November 21, 
1787, and made his debut as Seide in " Mahomet." 

In our chapter on Moliere, we left the Comedie 
Fran^aise, on its opening night in 1689, at the house 
in Rue de I'Ancienne-Comedie. There it remained 
for nearly a century, until forced, by overflowing 
houses, to find a larger hall. While this was in course 
of construction the company removed, in 1770, to the 
Salle des Machines in the Tuileries, already trans- 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION- 265 

formed into a theatre by the Regent for his ballets. 
Here the troupe played until the completion of the 
new theatre in 1782. That new Comedie Frangaise is 
now the Second Theatre Frangais, the Odeon, the sec- 
ond largest hall in Paris. It was burned in 1799 and 
again in 18 18. In 1789 it took the title of Theatre 
National ; in 1793, Theatre de TEgalite was the newest 
name forced upon the unwilling comedians, who were, 
as always with that profession, fond of swelldom and 
favorites of princes. The house being in the very cen- 
tre of the Cordeliers quarter, in la Section Marat, 
there was always constant friction between players 
and audience, and by 1793 this had so exasperated 
the ruling powers — the sans-culottes — that nearly the 
whole troupe was sent to prison, charged with hav- 
ing insulted the Patriots on the boards, and with hav- 
ing given " proofs of marked incivism." The ladies 
of the company, aristocrats by strength of their sex, 
occupied cells in Sainte-Pelagie, where we have al- 
ready listened to their merriment. They escaped trial 
through the destruction of their dossiers by a hu- 
mane member of the Committee of Safety, and the 
9 Thermidor set them free. Talma had already left 
the troupe in April, 1791, driven away, with two or 
three friends, by dissensions and jealousies. They 
went over to the new house which had been con- 
structed, in 1789, at a corner of the Palais-Royal, by 
enterprising contractors with influential politicians 
behind them. It was called at first Theatre Frangais 
de la Rue de Richelieu, and, in 1792, Theatre de la 



266 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Republique. On Talma's desertion of the old house, 
there began a legal process against him, exactly like 
that instituted by the same Comedie Frangaise against 
M. Coquelin, a century later, when the theatre had 
for its lawyer the grandson of its advocate of 1792; 
and the decision of the two tribunals was the same 
in effect. Talma stayed at the theatre in the Palais- 
Royal, to which he drew the discerning public, and, 
after ten years of rivalry, the two troupes joined hands 
on those boards, and so the Comedie Frangaise came 
to the present '' House of Moliere." 

It would seem that Talma was a shrewd man of 
business, and drew money in his private role of land- 
lord. He owned the house in which Mirabeau died, 
in Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin, and always referred 
to the great tribune as '' mon ancien locataire, Mira- 
beau." Just beyond, in Rue Chantereine, Talma was 
attracted by the small villa built by the architect Le- 
doux, for Condorcet, it is said. Perhaps the actor had 
sjeen, in that street, an even more plausible actor, 
Giuseppe Balsamo by name, calling himself the Count 
Cagliostro. He had established himself in one of the 
villas in this street, on coming to Paris to ply his trade, 
toward 1784. And in 1778 the wonder-working Mes- 
mer had set up his machinery and masqueraded as a 
magician in a house in the same street. Benjamin 
Franklin went there, one of a government commission 
sent to investigate the miracles. 

In his new residence in Rue Chantereine, Talma 
welcomed his friends among the Revolutionary lead- 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 267 

ers, and gave them bouillon in the kitchen, when he 
came home from the theatre at night. In 1795 he 
sold the villa to Josephine de Beauharnais, and he 
always said that her first payment was made to him 
from moneys sent to her, by her husband, from Italy. 
It is not known whether Talma owned, or leased, an 
apartment in No. 15 Quai Voltaire, where he lived 
from 1802 until 1806. The house, now No. 17, one 
of the ancient stately structures facing the quay, is 
somewhat narrower than its neighbors. During the 
ten years between 1807 and 1817 he had an apartment 
at No. 6 Rue de Seine; possibly in that pavilion in 
the court which was built by Marguerite de Valois 
for her residence, and which has been heightened by 
having two new floors slipped between the lower and 
top stories, leaving these latter and the facade much 
as she built them. His home, from 1818 to 1821, at 
No. 14 Rue de Rivoli, is replaced by the new structures 
at the western end of that street, which is entirely re- 
numbered. After two more changes on the northern 
bank, he finally settled at No. 9 Rue de la Tour-des- 
Dames. Until 1822 there was still to be seen the 
tower of the windmill owned by the "" Dames de Mont- 
martre/' which gave its name to this street. At its 
number 3, a small hotel, circular-fronted and most 
coquettish, lived Mile. Mars, it is believed, and here 
she was the victim of the earliest recorded theft of 
an actress's jewels. The simple and stately house, of 
a low curtain between two wings, with two stories 
and a mansard roof, bearing the number 9, is the 



268 THE STONES OF PARIS- 

scene of Talma's last years and of his death, on Oc- 
tober 19, 1826. Hi^ final appearance had been on June 
nth of that year, in his marvellous personation of 
Charles VI. At this house we shall see Dumas visit 
the old actor, who had seen Voltaire ! Dumas says 
that Talma spared nothing in his aim at accuracy, his- 
toric and archseologic, when creating a new role or 
mounting a new play. Indeed, w^e know that Talma 
was the first great realist in costume and scenery, as 
we know that he first brought the statues of tragedy 
down to human proportions and gave them life-blood. 
Dumas dwells especially on the voice of the great 
tragedian — a voice that was glorious and sincere, and 
in anguish was a sob. 

There is a glowing portrait of Talma from the pen of 
Chateaubriand, in which he makes plain that the tra- 
gedian, while he was, himself, his century and ancient 
centuries in one, had been profoundly affected by the 
terrible scenes of the Terror which he had witnessed; 
and it was that baleful inspiration that sent the con- 
centrated passion of patriotism leaping in torrents 
from his heart. " His grace — not an ordinary grace 
— seized one like fate. Black ambition, remorse, jeal- 
ousy, sadness of soul, bodily agony, human grief, the 
madness sent by the gods and by adversity — that was 
what he knew. Just his coming on the scene, just 
the sound of his voice, were overpoweringly tragic. 
Suffering and contemplation mingled on his brow, 
breathed in his postures, his gestures, his walk, his 
motionlessness." 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 269 

Thomas Carlyle seems strangely placed in the stalls 
of the Theatre Frangais, yet he sat there, at the end 
of his twelve-days' visit to Paris in 1825. " On the 
night before leaving," he writes, " I found that I ought 
to visit one theatre, and by happy accident came upon 
Talma playing there. A heavy, shortish, numb-footed 
man, face like a warming-pan for size, and with a 
strange, most ponderous, yet delicate expression in the 
big, dull-glowing black eyes and it. Incomparably 
the best actor I ever saw. Play was * CEdipe ' ; place 
the Theatre Frangais." 




Monogram from former entrance of the Cour du Commerce 
believed to be the initials of the owner, one Girardot. 



THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY 



THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY 

In preceding chapters we have come upon the small 
beginnings of the Scholars' Quarter; we have had 
glimpses of the growth of the great mother Univer- 
sity and of her progeny of out-lying colleges ; and we 
have trodden, with their scholars and students, the 
slope of " the whole Latin Mountain," as it was named 
by Pantaleon, that nephew of Pope Urban IV., who 
extolled the learning he had acquired here. Looking 
down from its crest, over the hill-side to the Seine, we 
have had under our eyes the mediaeval Pays Latin, 
filling up the space within its bounding wall, built by 
Philippe- Auguste and left untouched by Charles V. ; 
we have seen that wall gradually obliterated through 
the ages, its gate-ways with their flanking towers first 
cut away, its fabric picked to pieces, stone by stone; 
while, beyond its line, we have watched the building 
up, early in the seventeenth century, of the Faubourg 
Saint-Germain, over the Pre-aux-Clercs, and in the 
fields beyond, and along the river-bank toward the 
west. In the centre of this new quarter the nobility 
of birth was soon intrenched behind its garden-walls, 
and in the centre of the old quarter the aristocracy of 

273 



274 THE STONES OF PARIS 

brains was secluded within its courts. The bound- 
ary-line of the two quarters, almost exactly defined 
by the straight course from the Institute to the Pan- 
theon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable neu- 
tral ground between was settled by colonists from 
either region, servants of the State, of art, of letters. 
In our former strollings through long-gone centuries, 
we have visited many of these and many of the dwell- 
ers on the University hill ; we are now to turn our at- 
tention to those brilliant lights on the left bank who 
have helped to make Paris " la ville lumiere " during 
the forenoon of the nineteenth century. 

Through the heart of the faubourg curved the nar- 
row Rue Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Inva- 
lides to Rue des Saints-Peres. This eastern end, 
nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been 
carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and 
with it the hotel of the de Tocqueville family, which 
stood at No. yy of the ancient aristocratic street. Here 
in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville, with her 
son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel, a lad of fifteen. 
Here he remained until the events of 1830 sent him 
to the United States, with a mission to study their 
prison systems ; a study extended by him to all the 
institutions of the Republic, which had a profound in- 
terest for the French Republicans of that time. His 
report on those prisons appeared in 1832, and in 1835 
he put forth the first volume of " De la Democratic en 
Amerique," its four volumes being completed in 1840. 
That admirable survey of the progress of democracy 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 275 



— whose ascendancy he predicted, despite his own pre- 
dilections — still carries authority, and at the time cre- 
ated a wide-spread sensation. It made its author 
famous, and promoted him to the place of first-as- 
sistant lion in the salon of Madame Recamier, whose 
head lion was always Chateaubriand. De Tocqueville 
had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same fau- 
bourg; residing until 1837 at 49 Rue de Verneuil, 
and from that date to 1840 at 12 Rue de Bourgogne. 
Elected Deputy in 1839, he soon crossed the Seine, 
and we cannot follow him to his various residences in 
the quarter of the Madeleine. For a few months in 
1849 h^ served as Minister for Foreign Affairs in the 
cabinet of the Prince-President, and was among the 
Deputies put into cells in December, 1851. His re- 
maining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were 
spent in retirement from all public affairs. 

A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in 
the early years of the nineteenth century, was Fran- 
Qois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young professor at 
the Sorbonne. His classes were crowded by students 
and by men from outside, all intent on his strong 
and convincing presentation of his favorite historical 
themes. He lived, near his lecture-room, at No. 10 
Rue de la Planche, a street that now forms the east- 
ern end of Rue de Varennes, between Rues du Bac 
and de la Chaise. From 1823 to 1830 his home was at 
37 Rue Saint-Dominique, where now is No. 203 Bou- 
levard Saint-Germain, next to the Hotel de Luynes, 
already visited with Racine. This latter period saw 



276 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Guizot, after a temporary dismissal from his chair by 
the Bourbon King, at the height of his powers and 
his prestige as a lecturer. He carried his oratory to 
the Chamber of Deputies in 1830, and there compelled 
equal attention. In 1832 we find him, Minister of 
Public Instruction, installed in the official residence 
at 116 Rue de Crenelle, on the corner of Rue de Belle- 
chasse. His work while there still lasts as the basis 
of the elementary education of France, and it is to 
him that she owes her primary schools. Pushed out 
from this office in 1836 by the pushing Thiers, he 
went to England as Ambassador for a few months in 
1840, and in the autumn of that year he took up his 
abode in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he 
remained until he was driven out in 1848. That an- 
cient mansion, no longer in existence, stood on the 
triangle made by Boulevard and Rue des Capucines. 
With his desertion of this Southern Bank, we lose 
sight of his dwellings, always thereafter in the 
Faubourg Saint-Honore. Cuizot and Louis-Philippe 
failed in their fight against a nation, and the men of 
February, 1848, revolted against the Prime Minister 
as well as against the King of the French. That 
opera-houffe monarch with the pear-shaped face, un- 
der the guise of Mr. Smith, with a fat umbrella, slipped 
out of the back door of the Tuileries and away to 
England ; Guizot got away to the same safe shores in 
less ludicrous disguise. He returned to his own land 
in 1849, ^"^^ lived until 1874, always poor, always 
courageous, and always at work. Among his many 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 277 

volumes of these years, all marked by elevation of 
thought and serenity of style, as well as by absence of 
warmth and color, were his '* Memoires," wherein he 
proves, to the satisfaction of his austere dogmatism, 
that he had always been in the right throughout his 
public career. 

The Revolution of 1830, that sent de Tocqueville 
on his voyage, and that started Guizot in political 
life, brought Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine to 
the public ear as an orator. He had filled the public 
eye as a poet since 1820, when his '' Meditations 
Poetiques " appeared. In 1830, his " Harmonies Poet- 
iques et Religieuses " had made it sure that here was 
a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang 
the consolations of religion, as Chateaubriand had 
sung its splendors, he gave proof of his devotion to the 
Church and throne. But he bore the Revolution of 
1830, and the flight of the Bourbons, with the same 
equanimity he always summoned for the reverses of 
others, as well as for his own. When a literary genius 
is out of work, says Sainte-Beuve, he takes to politics 
and becomes an Illustrious Citizen, for want of some- 
thing better to do. Lamartine was elected a Deputy 
soon after the upset of 1830, and sprang at once into 
the front rank of parliamentary orators. His speeches 
in the Chamber, and his '' History of the Girondists " 
— enthralling and untrustworthy — helped to bring on 
the Revolution of 1848, quite without his knowing or 
wishing it. It was his superb outburst of rhetoric, 
as he stood alone on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, 



278 THE STONES OF PARIS 

on February 25th, backed by no colleague and clad 
in no authority, that saved to France her Tricolor — ■ 
" that has swept all around the world, carrying liberty 
^nd glory in its folds " — in place of the white flag of 
the Bourbons that had gone, and the red rag of the mob 
that was near coming. Between that month of Febru- 
ary and June of that same year, Lamartine had been 
on the crest of his highest wave, and had sunk to his 
lowest level in the regard of his Parisians. Their faith 
was justified in his genius and his rectitude, but a vol- 
cano is not to be squirted cold by rose-water, and the 
new republic could not be built on phrases. After his 
amazing minority in the election for president, Lamar- 
tine sank out of sight, accepting without complaint his 
sudden obscurity, as he had accepted without intrigue 
his former lustre. The conspiracy of December, 185 1, 
sent him into retirement, and he lived alone with his 
pen, his only weapon against want— a pathetically 
heroic figure during these last years. George Sand 
had seen a good deal of Lamartine in the days of 1848, 
and he struck her as " a sort of Lafayette without his 
shrewdness. He shows respect for all men and all 
ideas, while believing in no ideas and loving no man." 
A more just and complete judgment is that of Louis 
Blanc : " He is incessantly laboring under a self- 
exalting hallucination. He dreams about himself mar- 
vellous dreams, and believes in them. He sees what 
is not visible, he opens his inward ear to impossible 
sounds, and takes delight in narrating to others any 
tale his imasrination narrates to him. Honest and sin- 



THE SOUTHERN- BANK 279 



cere as he is, he would never deceive you, were he not 
himself deceived by the familiar demon who sweetly 
torments him." 

For twenty years he had been a resident of the 
Faubourg Saint-Germain. Indeed, when he came to 
Paris for a while, in 1820, to see to the publication 
of his first poems, he found rooms on Quai d'Orsay. 
From there he went to make that call on young Hugo, 
to be narrated later. From 1835 to 1855 his apart- 
ment was in the grand mansion, " between court and 
garden," No. 82 Rue de I'Universite. His reception- 
room was decorated with portraits and busts of Al- 
phonse de Lamartine, we are told by Frederick Locker- 
Lampson, who visited him there. His host was a 
handsome and picturesque figure, he says, albeit with 
an over-refinement of manner. No keener criticism 
of the poet and his poetry, at this period, has been 
made than that by Locker-Lampson, in one curt sen- 
tence. His sane humor is revolted by that " prurient 
chastity, then running, nay, galloping, to seed in an 
atmosphere of twaddle and toadyism." 

The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion 
and poverty by the Second Empire, whose few hon- 
orable acts may not be passed over. In 1867, in its 
and his dying years, that government gave him money, 
and the municipality gave him a house. These gifts 
came to him in Rue Cambaceres, in a small hotel now 
rebuilt into No. 7 of that street. Where it meets with 
Rue de Penthievre, just above, you will find the at- 
tractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut 



28o THE STONES OF PARIS 



in the stone over the doorway, in which, during the 
years after leaving the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he 
carried on his courageous struggle with his pen against 
debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment 
of his last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for 
he died there in 1869. It was at Passy, not far from 
the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named for him 
and holding his statue. The chair in which he is 
seated might be a theatrical property, . perhaps humor- 
ously and fittingly so suggested by the sculptor; who 
has, however, done injustice to his subject, in robbing 
him of his natural grace and suavity, and in giving 
him a pedantic angularity that was never his. 

When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, " I have 
wept, I who never weep," we are amused by the poet's 
naive ignorance of his persistent lachrymose notes. 
The " smiling critic " accepted them simply as a par- 
donable overflow of the winning melancholy of that 
nature, in which he recognized all that was genuine 
and laudable. This wide-minded tolerance is perhaps 
the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a critic. With 
his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its 
author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, 
he was splendidly impartial. He could read anything 
and everything, with a keenness of appraisement that 
did not prejudice his enjoyment of that which was 
alive, amid much that might be dead. " A pilgrim of 
ideas, but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim — 
faith " — he gave all that he was to literature through 
all his life, and when near its end, he had the right to 




/ 



J 



' ~AiI-. %i£iu SiJ' ilik&h i.'T£: 



Alphonse de Lamartine. 

(From a sketch by David d'Angers, " «« soir chez Hugo") 



{From a carbon print by Braun, Clement &" Co.] 



I 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 281 



say : '' Devoted with all my heart to my profession of 
critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and 
— if possible — a skilful workman." 

He devotee^ himself so entirely to his profession, 
that his life was like a mill, as he said, perpetually 
feeding and grinding. On the Monday morning, he 
would shut himself in with the new volumes, which 
he was to feed into himself and assimilate, during the 
twelve hours of each of the five following days; on 
Saturday he was ready to grind out the result. His 
Sunday holiday was given to the proof-reading of his 
next day's '' Causerie du Lundi." On that evening he 
took his only relaxation, in the theatre. His work- 
room was bare of all superfluities, and his daily life 
went in a round, with simple diet, no wine, nor cofifee, 
nor tobacco. 

At the age of twenty-five, Charles- Augustin Sainte- 
Beuve was living, with his mother, in a small apart- 
ment on the fourth floor of No. 19 — now 37 — Rue 
Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to 
letters instead of medicine, for which he had studied, 
and had become a regular contributor of critical pa- 
pers to the press. His name was already spoken along 
with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain, Guizot, 
Merimee. He had produced his *' Historical and 
Critical Pictures," his '' French Poetry and French 
Theatre of the Sixteenth Century," and the " Poems 
of Joseph Delorme " — his selected pen-name. The 
poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down 
many choice gifts. In this apartment he received for 



282 THE STONES OF PARIS 

review a volume of poems, " by a young barbarian," 
his editor wrote. This was the '' Odes et Ballades " 
of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made ac- 
quaintance, and at whose house, a few doors away in 
the same street, he became a constant visitor. From 
here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son, in 
1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he 
had his home during his remaining years. His official 
residence, from 1840 to 1848, as a Keeper of the Maza- 
rin Library, was in that building now occupied by the 
Institute. He found installed there, among the other 
Keepers, Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 
1848, drove Sainte-Beuve into Belgium. On his re- 
turn in the following year, he settled in the house left 
him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This 
two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du 
Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. 
From here, he went to take his chair of Latin poetry in 
the College de France, where he was hissed by the stu- 
dents, who meant to hiss, not the critic and lecturer, 
but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in 
accepting that chair. He was no zealous recruit, how- 
ever, and preserved his entire independence ; and when 
he consented to go to the Senate in 1865, it was for 
the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always 
poor in money. 

To his workroom in this house, came every French 
writer of those thirty years, anxious to plead with 
or to thank that Supreme Court of Criticism. Among 
those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 2^3 

to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the 
most vivid sketch of the critic in conversation : '* When 
I hear him touch on a dead man, with his httle phrases, 
I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a body ; clean- 
ing out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a 
very clean skull of the once illustrious one." For, in 
his unwritten caiiserie, Sainte-Beuve had the supreme 
art of distilling a drop of venom in a phial of honey, 
so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly. 
There is no more constant presence than his on this 
southern hill-side, where all his days and nights were 
spent. We seem to see there the short, stout figure, 
erect and active, the bald head covered with a skull- 
cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face, 
redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His 
walks were down this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which 
he thought of as the pleasure-ground of the mediaeval 
students of the University, to the quays, where he 
hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to 
stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In 
the Poets' Corner, now made there, you will find his 
bust along with those of Henri Murger, Leconte de 
Lisle, Theodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine. 

Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to 
No. 32, we find a modest house set behind its garden- 
wall, in which is a tablet containing the name of Edgar 
Quinet. More than passing mention of his name is due 
to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother 
thought that " an old gentleman named M. Voltaire " 
— whom she might have seen in her childhood, as her 



284 THE STONES OF PARIS 

village crowded about his carriage on its way to Paris 
— was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought 
up her boy to think for himself, after that philoso- 
pher's fashion, and the boy bettered her teachings. 
He spent his life in looking into the depths of beliefs 
and institutions, in getting at the essence of the real 
and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow 
and transitory ; so that, towards the end, he could 
say: '* I have passed my days in hearing men speak 
of their illusions, and I have never experienced a sin- 
gle one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt 
phrase, " a part of the conscience of France," and as 
such, his influence was of higher value than that ex- 
erted by his busy pen in politics, history, poetry. In- 
deed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and progress 
of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due re- 
straint. Of course he was honored by exile during 
the Second Empire, and when it tumbled to pieces, he 
returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles as a 
Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him 
as living and dying with the serene light of truth on 
his brow, and he can have no happier epitaph. 

Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life- 
long friend Jules Michelet, who died in 1874. He, 
too, had his homes and did his work, private and pub- 
lic, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away 
on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy 
and Saint-Denis, is now given over to business. It 
was a church, built about 1630 in the gardens of " Les 
Dames de Saint-Chaurnont," and had been closed in 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 285 



1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast 
to ruin, it was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, 
who came along in the person of the elder Michelet, 
a printer from Laon. He set up his presses in the 
nave and his household gods in the choir, where the 
boy Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The build- 
ing is unchanged as to its outer aspect, with its squat 
columns supporting the heavy pediment of the fagade, 
except that two stories have been placed above its 
main body. In these strange surroundings for a child, 
and in the shelters equally squalid, to and from which 
his father removed during many years, the boy grew 
up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and ill-clad, 
and always over his books when set free from type- 
setting. 

He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycee Charle- 
magne, but the pleasantest lesson and the dearest 
prize of his youth did not come in school. They were 
his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue Buf- 
fon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful 
with birds, of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, 
and a sky above an open space, had been unknown to 
his walled-in boyhood. When he became able to 
choose a home for himself, it had always its garden, 
or a sight of one. At an early age he went to tutor- 
ing; in 1 82 1 he was appointed lecturer on history in 
the College Rollin, then in its old place on the Uni- 
versity hill ; soon after 1830 he succeeded to Guizot's 
chair in the Sorbonne, and in 1838 the College de 
France made him its professor of History and Moral 



286 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Science. In that institution, he and his colleague 
Ouinet caused immense commotion by their assaults 
on the Church intrenched in the State, and from their 
halls the hootings of the clericals, and the plaudits of 
the liberals, re-echoed throughout France. The priest- 
hood complained that '' the lecturer on history and 
morals gave no history and no morals," and it began 
to be believed — rightly or wrongly — that he was using 
his professor's platform as a band-stand, and was beat- 
ing a big drum for the gratification of the groundlings. 
He was speedily dismissed, he was reinstated soon 
after 1848, and was finally thrown aside by the Second 
Empire. 

At this period only, he disappears from the Schol- 
ars' Quarter for a while. His earliest residence there 
was, soon after his marriage in 1827, at 23 Rue de 
I'Arbalete, a street named from the '^ Chevaliers de 
VArhalete," who had made it their archery grounds in 
mediaeval days. The site of Michelet's residence is 
fittingly covered by a large school, on the corner of 
that street and of the street named for Claude Bernard. 
After a short stay in Rue des Fosses-Saint- Victor — 
that street nearly all gone now — he returned to this 
neighborhood, and settled in Rue des Postes, which, 
in 1867, received the name of the grammarian Lho- 
mond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet 
street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century build- 
ings, among which is the Hotel Flavacourt, set in the 
midst of gardens. On its first floor Michelet lived from 
1838 to 1850. At No. 10 is the arched gateway through 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 287 

which he went, in its keystone the carved head of a 
strong man with thick beard and curUng locks. Above 
the long yellow-drab wall shows the new chapel of the 
priests, who, with unknowing irony, have taken his 
favorite dwelling for their schools. 

Absent from this quarter during the early years of 
the Second Empire, and absent from Paris during 
part of that time, it was in 1856 that Michelet settled 
in his last abode. It was at 44 Rue de I'Ouest, and 
his garden here was the great Luxembourg Garden. 
In 1867, the street was renamed Rue d'Assas, and his 
house renumbered 76. After his death in the south 
of France in 1874, his widow lived there until her own 
death in 1899, and kept that modest home just as he 
had left it. She was his second wife, and had been of 
great help to him in his work, and had done her own 
work, aided by his hand, which sprinkled gold-dust 
over her manuscript, as she prettily said. That hand 
had not been idle for over fifty years. He gave forty 
years of labor, broken only by his other books, to his 
" History of France," which at his death was not yet 
done, as he had meant that it should be done. It is 
a series of pictures, glowing and colored by his sym- 
pathetic imagination, which let him see and touch the 
men of every period, and made him, for the moment, 
the contemporary of every epoch. And Taine assures 
us, contrary to the general belief, that we may trust 
its accuracy. His style has a magic all its own. He 
had said : " Augustin Thierry calls history a narra- 
tion, Guizot calls it an analysis; I consider that his- 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



tory should be a resurrection." This idea is translated 
into durable rparble on his striking tombstone in Pere- 
Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercie. 

The life of Maximilien-Paul-Emile Littre, a few 
years longer than that of Michelet and equally full of 
strenuous labor, was passed on this same slope and 
ended in this same Street of Assas. Born on Febru- 
ary I, 1801, in the plain house of three stories and 
attic at No. 21 Rue des Grands- Augustins, he got his 
schooling at Lycee Louis-le-Grand, where we have 
seen other famous scholars. He appears for a day and 
a night on the barricades of 1830, and then settles 
quietly at No. 11 Rue du Colombier, now Rue Jacob. 
On his marriage, in 1835, he removed to No. 21 Rue 
des Macons, now Rue Champollion, once Racine's 
street, in the heart of the University. In 1838 he made 
his home in Rue de I'Ouest, and in that home he re- 
mained until his death on June 2, 1881. His apart- 
ment took up the entire second floor of present 44 
Rue d'Assas — the new name of Rue de I'Ouest — at 
the corner of Rue de Fleurus, and its windows on the 
curve opened on ample light and air. 

Like Sainte-Beuve, Littre gave up medicine, to 
which he had been trained, for journalistic work ; some 
of which, in his early days, was done for the Gazette 
Medicale, and much of it all through life for the po- 
litical press. He was an ardent Liberal, and after the 
fall of the Empire, was elected a Deputy, and later a 
Senator, of the Third Republic. Nothing in the do- 
main of literature seemed alien to this catholic mind. 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 289 



equally at ease in science and philosophy, philology 
and history. The enduring achievement of his life is 
his Dictionary of the French Language. It was begun 
in 1844 and completed in 1872, and a supplement was 
added in 1877. In his fortieth year, he was attracted 
by the teachmgs of Comte, and became a leader of 
the Positivists and a copious contributor to their re- 
view. His career is that of an earnest and a self- 
denying student; a teacher of unfettered thinking in 
science, religion, politics; a modest and disinterested 
fellow-worker in letters. 

His master in the cult that won him solely by its 
scientific fascinations, Auguste Comte, had lived for 
the last fifteen years of his life at No. 10 Rue Monsieur- 
le-Prince, and there he died in 1857. We can but 
glance at the tablet in passing, and we cannot even 
glance at the altered residences, in this quarter, of the 
gifted Amedee Thierry and of his more gifted brother, 
Augustin, the historian " with the patience of a monk 
and the pen of a poet." He died, in 1856, in Rue du 
Mont-Parnasse, in the house that had been Quinet's, 
it is said. We look up, as we go, at the sunny win- 
dows, facing full south over the Luxembourg Gardens, 
of the home of Jules Janin, in his day '' the prince of 
critics." They are on the first floor at the corner of 
Rues Rotrou and de Vaugirard, alongside the Odeon, 
the theatre in which he had his habitual seat. He died 
at Passy in 1874. 

This faubourg has had no more striking figure than 
that of Prosper Merimee, tight-buttoned in frock-coat. 



2go THE STONES OF PARIS 

and of irreproachable starchedness ; with a curiously 
round, cold eye behind glasses, a large nose with a 
sauare end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It 
was his pride to pass as an Englishman in his walk. 
In his work, in romance equally with archaeology, the 
gentleman prevails over the author, so that he seems 
to stand aloof, reserved, sceptical, correct; never 
showing emotion, never giving way to his really in- 
finite wit and frisky mockery. He began his work- 
ing-life in 1825, as a painter with his father, along- 
side the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des 
Petits-Augustins, now 12 Rue Bonaparte. In 1840 he 
moved around the corner to No. 10 Rue des Beaux- 
Arts, half way between the school and his other place 
of work in the Institute, as Inspector of the His- 
torical and Artistic Monuments of France. From 
1848 to 1 85 1 he was to be found at 18 Rue Jacob, 
and close at hand he found " I'lnconnue," at 35 of 
the same street. In 1852 he removed to his last resi- 
dence at 52 Rue de Lille, on the corner of Rue du 
Bac. The Commune burned that house along with 
others adjacent, and until rebuilding began, long after, 
there stood in the ruins a marble bust on its pedestal, 
unharmed except for the stain of the flames. It was 
all that was left of Merimee's great art-collection, 
with which, and with his books and cats, he had lived 
alone since his mother's death. He had gone away 
to Cannes to die in 1870. So that he did not see the 
ruins of the Empire, to which he had rallied, alto- 
gether from devotion to the Empress, whom he had 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 291 

known in Spain when she was a child. He accepted 
nothing from the Emperor except the position of Li- 
brarian at Fontainebleau, and was as natural and sin- 
cere with the Empress, as he had been with Eugenie 
Montijo playing about his knee. In his other office 
he was a loyal servant of the State, and to his alert, 
artistic conscience France owes the preservation of 
many historic structures. 

There are those who claim that the influence of 
Taine on modern thought has been deeper and will be 
more durable than that of Renan. They base their 
belief on the groundless notion that men are most pro- 
foundly impressed by pure reason, forgetful of that 
well-grounded experience, which proves that all men 
are touched and moved and persuaded rather by sen- 
timent than by conviction. And the writer is irre- 
sistible, who, like Renan, appeals to our emotional as 
well as to our thinking capacities. We are captivated 
by those feminine qualities in his strain that are dis- 
approved of by his detractors; his refined fancy and 
his undulating grace seduce us. We are convinced 
by his zest in the search for truth, by his courage in 
speaking it as he found it ; we recognize his sincerity 
and sobriety that do not demand applause ; we respect 
the magnanimity that looked on curses as oratorical 
ornaments of his enemies, and that took no return in 
kind. And so we stand in the peaceful court of home- 
like No. 23 Rue Cassette, on whose first floor Hippo- 
lyte-Adolphe Taine died in 1893, in respectful memory 
of the man who has helped us all by his dissections. 



292 THE STONES OF PARIS 

his cataloguing, and his array of facts. The structure 
of the philosop-hy of history, that he raised, stands im- 
posing and enduring on the bank of the stream of 
modern thought, and yet it may be that Edmond de 
Goncourt was not wholly wrong, in his characteriza- 
tion of Taine as " the incarnation of modern criticism ; 
most learned, most ingenious, and most frequently un- 
sound." We turn away and follow eagerly the steps 
of sympathetic Joseph-Ernest Renan. 

We have already seen the country boy coming to 
school, at Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in 1838. After 
four years' tuition there, he passed on to higher courses 
in the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. That renowned 
school faces the place of the same name, which it en- 
tirely covered, when built in the early years of the 
seventeenth century. When the Revolution demol- 
ished the old structure, it destroyed the parloir where 
the young student, the Chevalier des Grieux, gave way 
before the beguilements of his visitor, Manon Les- 
caut. The fountain in this open space flashes with that 
adorable creation of the Abbe Prevost; the original 
of two creations as immortal, says Jules Janin : " For 
who is the Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre but 
Manon made pure ; and who is Chateaubriand's Atala 
but Manon made Christian?" 

Once a week, while at the seminary, young Renan 
took an outing with the other pupils to its succursale 
at Issy. It is a dreary walk, along the wearisome 
length of Rue de Vaugirard, to the village to which 
Isis gave her name, when that goddess, once wor- 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 293 



shipped in Lutetia, was banished to this far-away 
hamlet. There " Queen Margot " had a hunting- 
lodge and vast grounds, and when these were taken 
by the brothers of Saint-Sulpice, they saved the 
grounds and transformed the cupids on the walls of 
the lodge into cherubs, and the Venus into a Madonna. 
Now their new structures in Caen stone face the street 
named for Ernest Renan. In the gardens is a chapel 
built around the grotto, roofed with shells, wherein 
Bossuet and Fenelon used to meet, toward the end 
of the eighteenth century. There they doubtless be- 
gan that controversy over the mystical writings of 
Madame Guyon, which ended in Fenelon's dismissal 
from the court through the influence of the imperious 
Bossuet. Under these trees that shaded them, walked 
Renan in his long and cruel conflict between his con- 
science and his traditions, most dreading the pain he 
would give his mother by the step he felt impelled to 
take. He took that step in October, 1845, when he 
laid aside the soutane — to be adorned and glorified 
by him, his teachers had hoped — and walked out from 
the seminary to a small hotel-garni on the opposite side 
of Place Saint-Sulpice. Supported at first only by the 
savings of his devoted sister, Henriette, he started as 
a tutor, and began his life's pen-work, in a cheap pen- 
sion, in one of the shabby houses just west of Saint- 
Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, in Rue des Deux-Eglises, now 
renamed Rue de rAbbe-de-l'Epee. 

His future dwellings, befitting his modest gains, 
were all in quiet streets of this scholarly quarter. The 



294 THE STONES OF PARIS 

site of that one occupied from 1862 to 1865, at 55 Rue 
Madame, is covered by College Bossuet, where priests 
teach their dogmas. Old Passage Sainte-Marie, where 
he lodged for a while in 1865, is now Rue Paul-Louis- 
Courier, and his lodging is gone. During the ten 
years from 1866 to 1876, he lived in the plain house 
numbered 29 of retired Rue Vaneau. Then for three 
years, he had an apartment at No. 16 Rue Guillaume ; 
" a short street of provincial aspect," says Alphonse 
Daudet, " grass-grown, with never a wheel ; of silent 
mansions and unopened gates, and of closed windows 
on the court ; faded and wan after centuries of sleep." 
This mansion was built for Denis Talon, an advocate- 
general at the end of the seventeenth century, and de- 
scribed by Germain Brice, writing in 1684, as having 
*' most agreeable apartments, with outlook on neigh- 
boring gardens, and a large court, and great expense 
in building." He did not mention the entrance-door, 
which is monumental, nor the knocker, worth a pil- 
grimage to see. In 1880 Renan removed to No. 4 Rue 
de Tournon, so finding himself between No. 6, once 
occupied by Laplace, and No. 2, once occupied by 
Balzac. In 1883 he was made Administrator of the 
College de France, and there took up his official resi- 
dence. His appointment to the chair of Hebrew in 
that institution, on his return from the Orient in 1861, 
had so perturbed the Church behind the State that he 
Vv/^as dismissed after he had given but one lecture. 

The Second Empire gone, he came back, mainly 
through the action of Jules Simon, a wise and learned 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 295 

statesman and a most lovable man. Renan the admin- 
istrator remained the lecturer as well, and has left 
ineffaceable memories with those who saw and heard 
him in his declining years; when, his body disabled 
by maladies, he still went singing on his way, as he 
manfully put it. It was a gross and clumsy body ; to 
use Edmond de Goncourt's words, an ungraceful, al- 
most disgraceful body, full of the moral grace of this 
apostle of doubt, this priest of science. His lectures 
were rather readings of the scriptures, interspersed 
with his own exegesis. On chairs about a large table, 
and against the wall, in a small room of the college, 
were seated the few intent listeners. Renan sat at 
one end of the table, his head — " an unchurched ca- 
thedral " — bent over a bulky copy of the scriptures as 
he read ; then, as he talked, he would raise his head 
and throw back the long hair that had tumbled over 
his brow, the subtle humor of his mobile mouth and 
his dreamy eyes effacing the effect of his big nose and 
fat cheeks, his beardless face luminous with an exalted 
intellectual urbanity. His interpretations and illustra- 
tions were spoken with his perfect, art of simple and 
limpid phrase, and in those tones that told of his dwell- 
ing with the saints and prophets of all the ages, and 
with the elusive spirits of mockery of our own day. 

He died, on October 2, 1892, in his official residence 
in the College de France, an apartment on the second 
floor of the main structure facing the front court. The 
austere simplicity of this Breton interior was leavened 
by the books and the equipment of the scholar. The 



296 THE STONES OF PARIS 

window of his death-chamber is just under the 
clock. 

The *' touch of earth " demanded by Tennyson's 
Guinevere was a need of the nature of George Sand. 
The three stages of her growth, shown in her work, 
reveal the three inspirations of her life, each most 
actual : the love of man, the love of humanity, the love 
of nature. The woman's heart in her made her, said 
Renan, " the ^olian harp of our time " ; and Beran- 
ger's verse well fits her : 

''^ Son ccEur est un luth suspendu ; 
Siiot qu'on le touche il resonne.'''' 

It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of 
injustice to man, and it pulsated with equal passion 
for her children and for the rural sights and scents of 
her birth-place. And we feel her heart in her phrases, 
that stir us, as Thackeray puts it, like distant country- 
bells. This half-poet, half-mystic, came fairly by her 
fantastic inheritance ; for she was, in the admirable 
phrase of Mr. Henry James, '' more sensibly the result 
of a series of love affairs than most of us." On the 
other side, we may accurately apply to her Voltaire's 
words concerning Queen Elizabeth : " And Europe 
counts you among her greatest men." There were 
masculine breadth and elevation in her cornplex, ample 
nature, with divine instincts and ideal purities, that 
left no room for vulgar ambitions and mean avidities. 
Balzac, of kindred qualities, wrote, after having learned 
to know her a little : " George Sand would speedily 
be my friend. She has no pettiness whatever in her 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 297 

soul ; none of the low jealousies that obscure so many 
contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this." 
When Madame Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, 
a young woman of twenty-six, came, in 1830, to Paris 
to stay — she had already, while a girl, been a pension- 
naire in the convent of the " Augvtstines Anglaises," 
where, under its ancient name, we have met with Mile. 
Phlipon — she found her only acquaintance in the 
capital, Jules Sandeau, living on Quai Saint-Michel. 
He had known M. Dudevant and his wife during his 
visit to Nohant, a year or so earHer. She rented a 
garret in the same house, one of the old row on the 
quay, just east of Place Saint-Michel. Here she discov- 
ered that she could use a pen ; at first with scant suc- 
cess and for small pay in the columns of the " Figaro," 
and then, with not much greater power, in a romance, 
written conjointly with Sandeau. They named it 
" Rose et Blanche," and its authors' pseudonyme was 
Jules Sand. Here she assumed the male costume 
which enabled her to pass for a young student, un- 
molested in her walks in all weathers and with all 
sorts and conditions of men, whom she delighted to 
scrutinize. In a letter written in July, 1832, she says 
that she is tired of climbing five long flights so many 
times a day, and is seeking new quarters. She found 
them, with the same superb outlook over the Seine as 
that she had left, on a third floor of Quai Malaquais. 

It may have been, for she always dwelt on her royal 
ancestry, in the house now No. 5, which had been 
the home of Maurice de Saxe. That son of Augustus 



298 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the Strong of Poland and of the Countess of Konigs- 
mark was the father of a natural daughter, who be- 
came the grandmother and guardian of Mile. Lucile- 
Aurore. Madame Dudevant gave his name to her 
son, and this young Maurice, and his sister Solange, 
were now brought to their mother's new home. She 
devoted hours to their amusement and instruction, and 
hours to her pen-work; writing far into the night 
when daylight did not suffice. She improvised a study 
in the ground floor on the court, cool when the west- 
ering sun flooded her windows above, and quiet when 
too many visitors disturbed her. For she had sprung 
into fame with her " Indiana " — its author styled 
George Sand — and after only two months' interval with 
her " Valentine." Naturally inert, she had to push 
herself on to work, and then her " serene volubility " 
knew no pause. She had now to be reckoned with in 
the guild of letters, and its members met in the " poets' 
garret," as she termed her little salon. 

Balzac came — he who discouraged her in the be- 
ginning, on Quai Saint-Michel — and Hugo and Dumas 
and Sainte-Beuve and young de Musset. With this 
last-named she went from here to Italy, having per- 
suaded his mother that his infatuation would reform 
the wayward youth. All the world knows, from the 
books on both sides, the story of the short-lived liaison. 
She returned to this home in August, 1834, hungry 
for her children. Then we lose sight of her for many 
years, in her visits to her beloved provincial scenes, 
and her journeys to other lands, and her temporary 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 299 



residences on the right bank of the Seine. In the 
winter of 1846 and 1847 she had a pied-a-terre in her 
son's studio, in the secluded square of Cours d'Orleans, 
its entrance now at 80 Rue Taitbout. There she was 
visited by Charles Dickens, who describes her as 
" looking like what you'd suppose the queen's monthly 
nurse would be; chubby, matronly, swarthy, black- 
eyed ; a singularly ordinary woman in appearance and 
manner." Others describe her, at this period, when 
she had just passed her fortieth year, as having a 
wearied, listless bearing, her only notable feature be- 
ing her dull, mild, tranquil eyes. In February, 1852, 
she was found by Mr. and Mrs. Browning in the small 
apartment attached to her son's studio, at No. 3 Rue 
Racine. It is at the top of the house, and can be rented 
to-day. A curious picture of her and her surround- 
ings is given by the Brownings. She was a constant 
attendant at this time at the Odeon — on whose stage 
her plays were produced — and at the restaurant in the 
place in front of the theatre. There she used to sit 
among her male friends, smoking *' those horrid big 
cigars " which so revolted Rachel that she would never 
meet the smoker. 

George Sand's last Paris home was in Rue Gay- 
Lussac, and she was one of the earliest tenants in that 
street, opened in 1868. She had three or four small 
rooms in the entresol of No. 5, the lease of which, after 
her death in 1876, was sold by her son to a Roumanian 
lady, along with some of his mother's furniture. This 
lady is delighted to chatter about her illustrious pred- 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



ecessor in this apartment, and allows the favored 
visitor to sit on the broad couch, covered in dingy and 
worn leather, whereon George Sand was fond of re- 
clining in her last tranquil days, at rest after stormy 
and laborious years. 

There is a hospitable little inn in the Faubourg Saint- 
Germain endeared to many of us by memories, joyous 
or mournful. The Hotel de France et de Lorraine, in 
narrow Rue de Beaune, just south of the quay, was one 
of the earliest hotels in Paris, and was an approved re- 
sort of the Royalists, before emigration and after Res- 
toration. They seem stih to haunt its court and halls, 
where there lingers that atmosphere of decayed Bour- 
bonism, which James Russell Lowell humorously hits 
off in a letter written when he was a guest here. The 
pervading presence is that of Chateaubriand, and our 
amiable hosts have a pride in keeping his apartment 
• — on the first floor, in plain wood panelling of time- 
worn gray — much as it was when he wrote, in its salon, 
his letter of resignation of his post in the Diplomatic 
Service, to the First Consul, to be Emperor within two 
months. Chateaubriand was in Paris on leave of ab- 
sence at the time of the shooting of the Due d'Enghien, 
in the ditch of Vincennes on the night of March 20, 
1804, and he refused to serve any longer the man whom 
he regarded as an assassin. Just seventeen years earlier 
these two men had arrived in Paris, both sub-lieuten- 
ants, of nearly the same age, equally obscure and ambi- 
tious, equally without heart. Napoleon Bonaparte, 
coming from Corsica, took a room in the Hotel de 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 301 

Cherbourg, as we have seen; Francois- Auguste, Vi- 
comte de Chateaubriand, coming from his natal town 
of Saint-Malo, found lodging in the Hotel de I'Europe 
in Rue du Mail. This street, between Porte Saint- 
Denis, by which the coaches entered, and Place des Vic- 
toires, where they put up, was full of hotels-garnis 
for travellers. Installed there, Chateaubriand hunted 
up the great Malesherbes, a friendly counsellor who 
put him in the way of meeting men of note; among 
others Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at the top of them 
all, just then, with his " Paul et Virginie." These two, 
the one just fifty, the other not yet twenty, then in 1787, 
strolled together in the Jardin du Roi, forgetting their 
old world and its worries, in their talks of the new world 
and its glories. 

During the next two or three years, Chateaubriand 
came frequently to Paris, an intent and disgusted on- 
looker at its doings. He stood, with his sisters, at their 
windows in Rue de Richelieu, open on that September 
day, when the mob surged by holding aloft on pikes the 
heads of Foulon and Berthier. His Royalist stomach 
revolted, and he joined his regiment at Rouen, to retire 
soon from the service, and to sail in 1791 for the new 
United States, with dreams of distinction as the discov- 
erer of the Northwest Passage. He dined with George 
Washington, to whom he carried a letter from a French 
officer, who had served in the colonial army. The Presi- 
dent waved aside Chateaubriand's florid compliments, 
and advised him to give up his futile quest. The young 
Breton wandered far into the new country, and while 



302 THE STONES OF PARIS 



resting in a clearing on the Scioto, where now is 
ChiUicothe, Ohio, he read in an old newspaper of the 
royal flight to Varennes, and of the enforced return. 
At once he started for France, to offer his sword to 
his King, arriving in January, 1792, and in the summer 
of that year he joined the growing train of emigres to 
England. For eight years he toiled and starved in 
London, and returned to Paris. in 1800. His passport 
bore the name of " Lassague," and he posted, in com- 
pany, as far as Forte de I'Etoile. Thence he went on 
foot down the Champs Elysees, finding none of the 
silence and desolation his fancy had pictured, but, on 
either hand, lights and music. On the spot where the 
guillotine had stood he stopped, provided with the 
proper emotions. He crossed Pont Royal, then the 
westernmost bridge, and betook himself to lodgings in 
Rue de Lille, in an entresol of one of the dignified man- 
sions, that seem still to stand aloof from their bourgeois 
neighbors. From here, he stole out to his meals, hiding 
his face behind his journal, in which he had been read- 
ing impassioned praise of the new book, '' Atala," and 
listened to the other guests speculating as to the un- 
known genius who had written it. The picture is to 
be cherished, for it is the only known portrait of Cha- 
teaubriand, modest and shrinking. He had brought the 
manuscript of " Atala " to Paris in his pocket, and had 
sought long before securing a publisher. The book 
found a public eager for novelty. It came in a period 
of sterility in letters, when all the virility of France had 
been spent in her colossal wars, and the new century 



THE SOUTHERN BANK Zot, 

was alert to greet the serene light of science and litera- 
ture. That came from all points of the horizon, but the 
resplendent figures of these years were Madame de 
Stael and Chateaubriand. 

These two had nothing in common, but they were not 
inimical, and Chateaubriand was one of the minor lions 
at Madame de Stael's receptions. For this was a little 
earlier than 1803, when a more beneficial air than that 
of Paris was ordered for her by the First Consul, whom 
she bored. This " cyclone of sentiment " must have 
bored Mr. Pitt, also, when she visited England during 
the Terror; for he seemed to think that the lady did 
protest too much about the absence of an equivalent in 
English for the French word " sentiment^' and he re- 
plied : '' Mais, Madame, nous Vavons; c'est ' My eye 
and Betty Martin.' " And when she got to Germany 
she bored Goethe, not only with her sloppy sentimental- 
ity, but with her shapely arms, too lavishly displayed. 
There could be no sympathy between the woman, who, 
in Sainte-Beuve's words, " could not help being even 
more French than her compatriots," and the stuff of 
whose dreams was a union of the theories of the dead 
and of the newly born centuries ; and Chateaubriand, 
the hard-headed opponent of every revolutionary idea, 
who pompously labelled himself " a Bourbon by honor, 
a Royalist by reason, and still by taste and nature a 
Republican " ! 

A year after his " Atala," in 1802, his " Genie du 
Christianisme " had placed him, in the estimation of 
his country and of himself, on a literary throne level 



304 THE STONES OF PARIS 

with the miHtary throne of Bonaparte. The rhetorical 
fireworks of this book, coruscating around the CathoHc 
Church, Hghted up the night of scepticism, when wor- 
ship had been aboHshed and God had been outlawed. 
Yet, as he poetized beyond recognition the North Amer- 
ican savages in his " Atala," so now he prettified the 
sanctuary and " gilded the Host." The First Consul, 
welcoming any aid in his scheme to use the Church for 
his own ends, sent the author to the legation at Rome. 
We have seen his return. After this, he moves about 
Paris, lodging, for a while, he says, " in a garret " of- 
fered him by Madame la Marquise de Coislin, a stanch 
friend and stanch Royalist. " Hotel de Coislin " may 
still be read above the doorway of the stately mansion 
that faces Place de la Concorde, at the western corner of 
Rue Royale, and aggressive Bourbonism speaks from 
its stone pillars and pediment. His garret there was no 
squalid lodging. On his return from the Holy Land 
in 1807, Chateaubriand planted the Jerusalem pines 
and cedars of Lebanon he had brought back, in the gar- 
den of " Vallee-aux-Loups," a little place he then pur- 
chased near Aulnay, on the south of the city. Here, 
while the Empire lasted, he passed years of quiet con- 
tent, with his wife, his plants, and his books, but writ- 
ing no more romance after 1809. In 18 17, having a 
town residence, and finding himself too poor to keep 
this country place, he sold it, and new buildings cover 
the site of his cottage and garden. 

Recalled to active life by the Restoration, Chateau- 
briand posed as one who was more Royalist than the 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 305 

King, with a mental reservation of his platonic fancy 
for a repubHc. He was a pretentious statesman, none 
too sincere. His pamphlet, '' De Buonaparte et des 
Bourbons," had been worth an army to the cause, said 
Louis XVin., who placed him in the Chamber of Peers, 
and in 1822, after a short stay at the Berlin Embassy, 
in the Ambassador's residence in London. Lording it 
there, in all " the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power," 
he recalled his former years of obscurity and privation 
in London streets, and began his " Memoires d'Outre 
Tombe." In writing about himself he was at his ease, 
feeling that he had a subject worthy of his best powers, 
and these memoirs have little of the inflated and fantas- 
tic mannerisms of his romances about other people. As 
to the rest, they are a colossal monument to his conceit 
and selfishness. Dismissed suddenly and indecently by 
Louis XVHL, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 
Chateaubriand was made Ambassador to Rome on the 
accession of Charles X., in 1828. He refused to recog- 
nize the younger branch of the Bourbons in 1830, and 
when the crown was given to Orleans, he strode out 
of the Chamber of Peers, and stripped himself of his 
peer's robe, with great theatric effect. Appearing no 
more in public life, he was active in pamphlets and in 
the press as an opponent of the new royalty, which 
would lead to a republic, he predicted. 

" Chdteauhrillant, Vicomte de, Rue de VUniversite 
2s'' is his address in the Bottin of 1817; a record of 
interest in its antiquated spelling of his name, and be- 
cause this is the house, on the corner of Rue du Bac, 



3o6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

which we shall visit later with Alexandre Dumas. This 
three years' lease expiring in 1820, he removed to the 
fine old mansion, where he gave reception to young Vic- 
tor Hugo, to be described later, at No. 2^ Rue Saint- 
Dominique. Its site is covered by the modern building 
numbered 197 in Boulevard Saint-Germain, whose 
southern side, just here, replaces the same side of Rue 
Saint-Dominique, as has been already told. He kept 
other town addresses, to which we need not follow 
him, during his absences on diplomatic duty. From 
1827 to 1838 we find him and Madame de Chateau- 
briand in their retired home, in the southern outskirts 
of the city. Their 84 Rue d'Enfer is now 92 Rue 
Denfert-Rochereau, the old street name thus pun- 
ningly extended, in homage to the heroic defender 
of Belfort. 

The dingy yellow front of the long wall and the low 
building is broken by a gate-way, and within is a small 
lodge on the left, wherein sits a woman in the cos- 
tume of a sisterhood. She permits entrance into the 
cottage on the right, and you are in Chateaubriand's 
small salon, the remaining portion of the cottage being 
now in possession of the Institution des Jeunes Filles 
Aveugles, alongside. His portrait in pencil, and a 
water-color sketch of his wife, hang on the wall. Her 
face shows the boredom and patience that were put 
into it by her life with this man of irascible genius and 
of frequent infidelities. She is buried behind the altar 
of the chapel of the Marie-Therese Infirmary, which 
she founded and carried on, in the devoutness that dwelt 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 307 

in her soul for the Church, whose appeal to him was in 
* its artistic endowments. A portion of the revenue that 
supports this institution comes from the sale of choco- 
late, made first to her liking by her chef, and made after 
his rule ever since. As Soeur Marie shows you out 
from the salesroom, alongside this little reception-room, 
you see the group of trees in the circular lawn, that was 
planted by husband and wife ; on the farther side are 
the dilapidated buildings of their day, now used for the 
chocolate fabrique; behind the great court rise the 
walls of the Infirmary for aged and invalid priests. 
Chateaubriand had known, while in Kensington dur- 
ing his exile, many of the impoverished cures who were, 
like himself, refugees from the Revolution ; and some 
of them had followed him here, and had become do- 
mesticated pets of the household, together with the big 
gray cat given him by the Pope. To them and their 
successors in poverty and illness, he bequeathed this 
comfortable retreat. 

There is an episode of these years that shows a kindly 
side of Chateaubriand, that he seldom allows us to see. 
He was suggested for the presidency of the republic, ad- 
ventured by the political clubs for a year or two after the 
unwelcome accession of Louis-Philippe. Chateau- 
briand did not join the plotters, but he was arrested, 
along with many of them, and locked up for two weeks 
or so. Now, when the Bourbons had put Beranger in 
prison, in 1828, Chateaubriand had been one of the 
many sympathizers who had flocked to the cell of the 
courageous singer. In 1832 the roles were reversed, 



3o8 THE STONES OF PARIS 

and Beranger came in, from his cottage in Rue de la 
Tour-d'Auvergne, to visit the imprisoned statesman. 
And after Chateaubriand's release, he wrote a charm- 
ing letter to Beranger, thanking him for that token of 
fellow-feeling, and begging him not to *' break his 
lyre," as the veteran chansonnier had threatened to do, 
and urging him to go on " making France smile and 
weep; for, by a secret known only to you, the words 
of your chansons are gay and the airs are plaintive." 
Beranger's songs touch no chord now, their plaintive- 
ness is commonplaceness, his philosophy has no lofti- 
ness, his sentimentality is of the earth earthy, and his 
lyre is, to us, a tinkling hurdy-gurdy. 

When the young Breton officer walked through Rue 
du Mail first in 1787, his gaze might have turned, as 
our gaze turns to-day, to two striking facades in that 
street : that of No. 7, built by Colbert, whose emblem- 
atic serpents are carved high up in the capitals of the 
heavy columns; and that of No. 12, as stolid as the 
other is fantastic, its heaviness not lightened b}^ the 
two balconies, and their massive supports, on the wide 
stone front. It was erected in 1792 by Berthault, the 
architect whose work we see at Malmaison and in the 
Palais-Royal. Chateaubriand might well have been 
attracted by this house, for it was soon to .shelter the 
woman who became later the lasting influence of his 
life. 

In 1793, at the very top of the Terror, Jacques Re- 
camier brought to this house his bride not yet six- 
teen, who had been Mile. Jeanne-FranQoise-Julie-Ade- 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 309 



laide Bernard. Here they lived for five years. Their 
house is unaltered as to fabric, and the original heavy, 
circular, stone staircase still mounts to the upper floors. 
These are now divided by partitions into small rooms, 
and the lofty first story is cut across by an interposed 
floor; all for the needs of trade. The ceiling of the 
grand salon retains its admirable cornice. Like other 
mansions on the south side of Rue du Mail, this Re- 
camier house extended, behind a large court, now 
roofed over with glass, through to Rue d'Aboukir, 
where its rear entrance is at No. 11. On the first floor 
of this wing, in the oblong ceiling of a small room, is a 
deeply sunk oval panel, that holds a painting of that 
time, in good preservation. 

From here Jacques Recamier, just then wealthy, re- 
moved to the newest fashionable quarter of which the 
centre was Rue du Mont-Blanc, now Rue de la Chaus- 
see-d'Antin, whose No. 7 covers the site of his magnifi- 
cent mansion. It was then a street of small and elegant 
hotels, each in its own grounds, and M. Recamier 
bought the one that had belonged to Necker, and had 
been confiscated by the State. He bought also the ad- 
joining house, and rebuilt the two into one. Its furni- 
ture, fittings, bronzes, and marbles were all especially 
designed for this new palace of a prosperous financier. 
Here was the scene of those balls that were the wonder 
of Paris during the Consulate and the early years of the 
Empire. The costumes of the period, both for men and 
women, were picturesque in cut and coloring. Among 
the guests shone Caroline Bonaparte, later to marry 



3IO THE STONES OF PARIS 

Murat, the youngest of the sisters and most resembhng 
her ofreat brother in face and character. M. and Mme. 
Recamier spent their summers in a chateau owned by 
him in the suburbs of Chchy ; and to it every man of 
note in the State and the army found his way. Napo- 
leon said he, too, would be glad to go to Chchy, if the 
fair chatelaine would not come to court, and sent 
Fouche to arrange it, but with no success. She fought 
shy of Napoleon, the man and the Emperor, as Ma- 
dame de Stael itched for his attention, personal and 
political. Nor did Madame Recamier like his brother 
Lucien, who languished about her, to the ridicule of his 
equally love-lorn rivals. 

His justification, and that of all her other adorers, 
speaks from David's unfinished canvas in the Louvre. 
Yet this shows only the outer shell of her loveliness ; 
within was a lovely nature, simple and kindly, sympa- 
thetic and loyal, that made her generous in her friend- 
ships with men and women, and devoted to the welfare 
of her friends. The single passion of her life was her 
passion for goodness. Her modesty kept her uncon- 
scious of her attractions of mind and body, and thus 
she held, almost unaware, the widest dominion of any 
woman of her day. The Duchess of Devonshire put it 
daintily : " First she's good, next she's spiritueUe, and 
after that, she's beautiful." And so, as we come to 
know her, we learn infinite respect for the woman, who 
" with an unequalled influence over the hearts and wills 
of men, scorned to ask a favor, and endured poverty 
and . . . exile, which fell with tenfold severity on 




Madame Recamier. 

(From the portrait by Gros. ) 



{From a carbon print by Braun. Clement bf Co.] 



THE SOUTHERN' BANK 3ii 



one so beloved and admired, without sacrifice of dig- 
nity and independence." 

Comparative poverty, hurried by the Emperor, came 
in 1806, and the town house and the chateau were sold, 
along with her plate and jewels. In 181 1 she was exiled 
from Paris on the pretext that her salon was a centre 
of Royalist conspiracy, and she passed the years until 
the Restoration in the south of France, in Italy, and in 
Switzerland with her beloved Madame de Stael. 

Just beyond the Boulevards de la Madeleine and des 
Capucines, which show the line of the rampart levelled 
by Louis XIV., and along the course of its outer moat, 
a new street had started up at the end of the eighteenth 
century, and was completed in the early years of the 
nineteenth century. It began at present Rue de la 
Chaussee-d'Antin, and ended at the Church of the 
Madeleine, then in course of construction ; it was built 
up in the best style of that period, and it was named 
Rue Basse-du-Rempart. That untouched section, to 
the west of Rue Caumartin, shows us the admirable 
architecture of the early Empire in the stately fronts, 
that shrink back behind the boulevard in stony-faced 
protest against its turmoil. Eastwardly from Rue 
Caumartin, the northern side of Boulevard des Capu- 
cines has trampled out nearly the whole of the old 
street. The stones of Place de I'Opera lie on the site of 
the modest house, at 18 Rue Basse-du-Rempart, taken 
by M. Recamier after his first business reverses, and 
occupied by him during his wife's exile; and the 
florist's shop, under the Grand Hotel, is on the spot of 



312 THE STONES OF PARIS 

their stately residence at No. 32 of the same street, af- 
ter her return and until 1820. In that year, his fortune 
regained, he moved farther west in the same street to a 
more sumptuous home at No. 48. This house has been 
happily saved for us, and is now numbered 18 of Boule- 
vard des Capucines ; one of the three structures of the 
old street, which stand back from the line of modern 
frontage, and lower than the level of modern paving. 
The present No. 16 is the Recamier coach-entrance, and 
the huge stabling in the rear is built on the Recamier 
gardens. Their house preserves its wrought-iron bal- 
conies, and within is the circular staircase mentioned 
in her " Memoires." Down these stairs, for the last 
time, she came in 181 9, leaving M. Recamier to his dis- 
astrous speculations, which had at last swallowed up 
her own fortune, and drove to the Abbaye-aux-Bois. 
There was her home until her death in 1849. 

The venerable mass of the convent is in sight behind 
the railed-in court at No. 16 Rue de Sevres. One por- 
tion that we see was built in 1640 for the '' Annon- 
ciades," and from them bought by Anne of Austria, in 
1654, for the sisterhood of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, who 
had been driven from their convent near Compiegne by 
the civil wars of the Fronde. That wing which was 
burned in 1661 was speedily rebuilt, and forms part of 
the structure before us. Convents had then, and have 
still, rooms and apartments which are let or sold to lone 
spinsters and widows, and to " decayed gentlewomen 
who have seen better days." This Abbaye-aux-Bois, 
during the Bourbon Restoration, " when the sky had 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 



?>^Z 



no horizon," was a favorite retreat for fashionable 
devotes, mending their reputations by a temporary re- 
tirement. The hfe there is pleasantly described in the 
early letters of Mary Clarke — later Madame Julius 
Mohl — who lived there with her mother. M. Bernard, 




The Abbaye-aux-Bois. 



the father of Madame Recamier, had bought one of its 
grandest apartments for his daughter, after the first 
bankruptcy of her husband. When she came here it 
was occupied, and she rented a shabby upper floor for 
two or three years, and then went down to her own 
apartment on the first floor, to which she added another 



314 THE STONES OF PARIS 

in the rear of the same floor. It is in the western wing, 
of modern construction, with windows on Rue de 
Sevres, and on the terrace that overlooks the garden, 
now shorn of a goodly slice by Boulevard Raspail. We 
know all about this salon, famous for twenty years, 
the roll of whose frequenters holds every illustrious 
name in France during that period, as well as those of 
many charlatans and bores. 

It is reported that Madame Recamier and Chateau- 
briand met first, in the earliest years of the century, at 
the receptions of Madame de Stael. Whenever they 
met to become mutually attracted, this attraction grew 
in him until it became the dominant sentiment of his 
life. With all his elevation of soul and his breadth of 
mind, he had no depth of feeling. " I have a head, 
good, clear, cold," he wrote ; '* and a heart that goes 
jog-trot for three-and-one-half quarters of humanity." 
The other one-eighth was Madame Recamier, and she 
outcounted all the rest of the world in stirring such 
heart as he had. " You have transformed my nat- 
ure," he tried to make her believe, and he may have 
believed it himself. Sick with conceit as he was, 
spoiled by flattery, morbid from introspection, her 
companionship lifted him out of his melancholy and 
raised him into serenity. As for her, so long as Ma- 
dame de Stael lived, she had no other affection to 
spare for anyone, and perhaps this incomparable creat- 
ure never gave to Chateaubriand more than homage 
to her hero, tenderness to the isolated man, and medi- 
cine to a mind diseased. He may well have written, 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 3i5 

toward the last : *' I know nothing more beautiful nor 
more good than you." 

The '' chemifu des vaches " of the sixteenth century 
became a country road by the passage of the drays that 
carted stone, from the Vaugirard quarries to the ferry 
on the southern shore, for the building of the Tuileries. 
The Pont Royal of Mansart has taken the place of the 
wooden bridge built above that ferry, and the ferry has 
given the name to that road, now Rue du Bac. Along 
its line, on both sides, seigneurs and priests took land 
and built thereon. There are yet, behind the huge stone 
blocks of houses, immense tracts of grounds and of 
woodland, unsuspected by the wayfarer through the 
narrow, noisy street. One of the most extensive of 
these open spaces is owned by the Seminary of the 
Missions Etrangeres, whose church is near the cor- 
ner of Rue de Babylone. For two bishops, who had 
charge here in the time of Louis XIV., were erected 
two houses, exactly alike without and within, and these 
are now numbered 1 18 and 120 Rue du Bac. In the lat- 
ter in the apartment on the ground floor, M. and Mme. 
de Chateaubriand installed themselves in 1838; having 
left their cottage and its domain in Rue d'Enfer, to the 
needy priests there. Here, in an angle of the front 
court, are the low stone steps that mount to their apart- 
ment. 

Its dining-room and a chapel, arranged by them, 
gave on this court. The chapel has been thrown into, 
and made one with, the dining-room, but this is the only 
alteration since their time. His bedroom, and that of 



3i6 



THE STONES OF PARIS 




Portal of Chateaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac. 

his wife — with her huge bird-cages behind — and the 
salon between the two rooms, looked out on their gar- 
den, and beyond it on the vast grounds of the Missions 
Etrangeres. The enchanting seclusion was dear to 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 317 

him in these last years, during which his only work 
was the completion and touching-up of his " Memoires 
d'Outre Tombe." Select extracts from the manuscript 
were sometimes read by him to the group that as- 
sembled in the drawing-room at the dbhaye, between 
four and six o'clock of ^N^y afternoon. The hostess 
sat on one side of the fireplace, her form grown so 
fragile that it seemed transparent for the gentle spirit 
shining out, like a radiant light within a rich vase. 
Chateaubriand '' pontificated " in his arm-chair oppo- 
site, toying with the household cat, the wliile he tried 
to listen to the lesser men ; " a giant bored by, and 
smiling pitifully down on, a dwarf world," is Amiel's 
phrase. When Chateaubriand spoke or read, it was 
with sonorous tones, and with attitude and gesture of 
a certain stateliness. He was always an artist in all de- 
tails. His costume was simple and elegant. Short of 
stature, he made himself shorter by his way of sink- 
ing his head — '' an Olympian head," says Lamartine 
— between his shoulders. Under his thick-clustering 
locks rose a noble forehead, power shone from his 
eyes, pride curled his lips — too often — and his expres- 
sion gave assurance of a glacial reserve. 

The day came when he found himself too feeble for 
the short walk between his house and the dbhaye. 
Then his friend came to him. She and Madame de 
Chateaubriand had been sufficiently friendly, but that 
good lady gave her days to her prayer-books, and to 
reading her husband's books ; which she never under- 
stood, albeit she had the finest mind of any woman he 



3i8 THE STONES OF PARIS 

had known, he always asserted. She died in the winter 
of 1846-47, and her body was carried to the Infirmary, 
the care of which had been the occupation and the hap- 
piness of her later years. Jacques Recamier, when in 
mortal illness in 1830, had been brought to his wife's 
rooms in the abhaye, at her request and by special favor 
of the Mother Superior, and there he had died. 

And now, Chateaubriand offered marriage to Ma- 
dame Recamier, and she refused what she might have 
accepted, could it have come a few years earlier. " But, 
at our age," she asked, " who can question our intimacy, 
or prevent me taking care of you ? " She was pre- 
vented only by the cataract that slowly blinded her, and 
she sat by his bedside, helpless, while Madame Mohl — 
who had remained Mary Clarke until the summer of 
1847 — wrote his necessary letters. That sympathizing 
woman, one of the few congenial to him, had only to 
come down from the apartment she had taken on the 
third floor of this house, overlooking the gardens ; the 
apartment which she and her learned husband, Julius 
Mohl, made the social successor of the Recamier salon, 
through many years. Chateaubriand's death took place 
on July 4, 1848. He had lived to see the Orleans throne, 
which he hated, overthrown as he had foretold by the 
republic, which he did not love. His faithful lady stood 
by his deathbed, with Beranger, equally faithful to old 
friends, old customs, and old clothes, clad as we see him 
in his statue of Square du Temple. 

Chateaubriand's funeral service, attended by all that 
was best in France, was solemnized in the Church of 



THE SOUTHERN BANK 319 

the Missions Etrangeres, next door, and his body was 
laid in a rock of the harbor of Saint-Malo. Madame 
Recamier went back to her now desolate rooms. On 
May 10, 1849, she drove over to the Bibliotheque de 
I'Arsenal, on a visit to her niece, whose husband, M. 
Lenormant, was its librarian and had his apartment 
there. That night she died in that building, in a sudden 
seizure of cholera. 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC^ 

Set in the front wall of a commonplace house, in the 
broad main street of sunny Tours, a tablet records the 
birth of Balzac in that house, on the b'j Floreal, An 
VII . of the Republic — May i6, 1799 — the day of Saint- 
Honore, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy 
of the parents, and they gave it to their son. Many 
a secluded corner of the town, many a nook within and 
about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many a portrait 
of its priests, has been brought into his books. And 
he has portrayed, with his artist hand, the country 
round about of the broad Loire and of bright Touraine, 
always vivid in his boyish reminiscences. In his life 

^ Just as Balzac was a victim of calumny during life, so, since 
death, has he suffered from carelessness. It is almost impossible to 
make sure of incidents and dates in his career. These errors begin 
with his birth, which is placed on the 20th May by many writers, 
and is so cut on the memorial tablet in Paris. In this text, his birth- 
date is fixed on the 1 6th May, on the strength of his family records, 
and the statements of his life-long friends. Of these, some say that 
he was born on the sy Floreal, and others on the day of Saint-Honore. 
No figuring can make these dates fall on any other day than the i6th 
May. As for the many conflicting statements concerning him that 
have been handed down, in the absence of indisputable evidence, 
those alone are accepted here which are most nearly in keeping with 
the proven facts and dates in his life. 

323 



324 THE STONES OF PARIS 



and his work, however, he was, first and always, a 
Parisian. To the great town, with all its mysteries and 
its possibilities, his favorite creations surely found their 
way, however far from it they started, drawn thither, 
as was drawn and held their creator, by its unconquer- 
able authority. 

His father had been a lawyer, forced for safety dur- 
ing the Revolution into army service, and when he was 
ordered from Tours, in 1814, to take charge of the com- 
missariat of the First Division of the Army in Paris, 
he brought his family with him. Their abode was in 
Rue de Thorigny, one of the old Marais streets, and the 
boy, nearly fifteen, was put to school in the same street, 
and later in Rue Saint-Louis, hard by. Transformed 
as is this quarter, there yet remain many of the mag- 
nificent mansions with which it was built up in the days 
of its grandeur, and their ample halls and rooms and 
gardens serve admirably now as schools for boys and 
for girls. The young Honore and his Louis Lambert 
are one in their pitiful memories of these schools and of 
their earlier schooling at the Seminary of Vendome. 

To please his father, the boy, when almost eighteen, 
went through the law course of the Sorbonne and the 
College de France. To please himself he listened, for 
the sake of their literary charm, to the lectures of Vil- 
lemain and Cousin and Guizot, and would rehearse them 
with passion when he got home. But he had no love 
for the arid literature of the law, and was wont to 
linger, in his daily walks along the quays and across the 
bridges to and from his lecture-rooms, over the book- 




3 



> 



CL, 



3 
O 

U 



H 



THE PARIS OF HON ORE DE BALZAC 325 



Stalls, Spending his modest allowance for old books, 
which he had learned already to select for their worth. 

These studies ended, he entered the law office of M. 
de Merville, a friend of his father, with whom Eugene 
Scribe had just before finished his time, and to whom 
Jules Janin came for his training a little later. And 
these three, unknown to one another, were, as it hap- 
pened, of the same mind in their revolt against the 
drudgery of the desk, and against the servitude of the 
attorney, coupled with certain competence as it might 
be; and in their preference for that career of letters, 
which might mean greater toil, but which brought im- 
mediate freedom and promised not far-off fame, and 
perhaps fortune, too. 

The elder Balzac, severely practical, dreamed no 
dreams, and was horrified by his son's refusal to pursue 
the profession appointed for him. He foretold speedy 
starvation, and — perhaps to prepare Honore for it — 
allowed him to try his experiment, for two years, on a 
hundred francs or less a month. So, the family having 
to leave Paris early in 1820, a garret — literally — was 
rented for the young author, and poorly furnished by 
his mother; a painstaking, hard-working, fussy old 
lady, who looked on him as a little boy all her life long, 
who drudged for him to his last days, and who felt it 
to be her duty to discipline him to hardship in these 
early days ! This attic-room was at the top of the old 
house No. 9 Rue Lesdiguieres, which was swept away 
by the cutting of broad Boulevard Henri IV. in 1866- 
6y, its site being in the very middle of this new street. 



326 THE STONES OF PARIS 

To wax sentimental — as has a recent writer — over the 
present No. 9 as Balzac's abode is touching, but hardly 
worth while, that house having no interest for us be- 
yond that of being of the style and the period of Balzac's 
house, and serving to show the shabbiness of his sur- 
roundings. These did not touch the young author, 
whose garret's rental was within his reach, as was the 
Librairie de' Monsieur; for he gives it the old Bourbon 
name, and how it got that name shall be told in our last 
chapter. It was the Library of the Arsenal, still open 
to students as in his days there, in the building begun 
by FranQois I. for the casting of cannon, which he made 
lighter and easier of carriage, and the casting of which 
exploded the Arsenal within twenty years, and with it 
part of the adjacent Marais. The Valois kings rebuilt 
it, Henri IV. enlarged it, and gave it for a residence 
to his Grand Master of artillery, Sully, for whom he 
decorated the salons as we see them to-day. You may 
climb the grand staircase, and stand in the rooms — their 
gildings fresh, their paintings bright — occupied by the 
great minister. In the cabinet that contains his furni- 
ture and fittings is an admirable bust of the King. And 
you seem to see the man himself, as he enters, his de- 
bonair swagger covering his secret shamefacedness for 
fear of a refusal of his stern treasurer to make the little 
loan for which he has again come to beg, to pay his last 
night's gambling or other debt of honor ! 

In this library by day, and in his garret by night, 
Balzac began that life of terrific toil from which he 
never ceased until death stopped his unresting hand. 



THE PARIS OF HO MORE DE BALZAC 327 

The novels he produced during these years were hard- 
ly noticed then, are quite unknown now ; showing no 
art, giving no promise. He never owned them, and 
put them forth under grotesque pen-names, such as 
" Horace de Saint-Aubin," " Lord R'hoone " — an ana- 
gram of Honore — and others equally absurd, all telling 
of his fondness for titles. 

This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is 
vividly pictured in " La Peau de Chagrin," written in 
1830, as Raphael's room in his early days, before he be- 
came rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to his sister 
Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with de- 
lightful gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within 
these weather-worn walls ; and his ingenious shifts in 
daily small expenditure of sous to make his income 
serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought 
home in his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched 
up from the court-pump his large allowance of water. 
For he used it lavishly in making his coffee, that stimu- 
lation supplying the place of insufficient food, and car- 
rying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive 
excitation and excessive toil, begun thus early, went on 
through all his life, and he dug his too early grave with 
his implacable pen. His only outings, by day or by 
night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing 
acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his sol- 
itary strolls through the great graveyard of Paris, near 
at hand. " Je vais megayer au Pere-Lachaise," he 
writes to his sister; and there he would clim.b to the 
upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched 



328 THE STONES OF PARIS 



out. For he was fond of height and space, and we shall 
see how he sought for them in his later dwelling- 
places. 

And in this storm-swept attic he had his first dreams 
of dwelling in marble halls. Extreme in everything, he 
could imagine no half-way house between a garret and 
a palace ; he began in the one, he ended in the other, 
unable to find pause or repose in either ! 

Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge 
his favorite young heroes into floods of sudden soft 
opulence, and his longings for luxury found expression 
in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth which 
made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first 
practical project was started in 1826, during a tem- 
porary sojourn for needed rest and proper food at his 
father's new home in Villeparisis, eighteen miles from 
Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He speedily 
hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher ; 
bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works 
of Moliere and of La Fontaine, each with his own in- 
troduction, each in one volume — compact and incon- 
venient — and, at the end of the year which saw twenty 
copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid 
of, to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. 
This and other failures left him in debt, and to pay 
this debt and to gain quick fortune, he set up a type- 
foundry in partnership with a foreman of his printing- 
office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 
17 Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; 
named for the famous archaeologist who had lived, and 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 329 



in 1818 had died, in that venerable mansion hard by 
on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. 
We have already found our way to this short and nar- 
row Rue Visconti, to visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste 
Du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival houses of Racine. 

Balzac's establishment, now entirely rebuilt, was as 
typical a setting of the scene as any ever invented by 
that master of scene-setting in fiction. It may be seen, 
as it stood until very lately, in its neighbor No. 15, 
an exact copy of this vanished No. 17. Its frowning 
front, receding as it rises, is pierced with infrequent 
windows, and hollowed out by a huge, wide doorway, 
within which you may see men casting plates for the 
press, albeit the successors of ''" Balzac et Barbier " no 
longer set type nor print. 

" Bahac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des 
Marais-Saint-Germain, J/; '' so appears the firm in the 
Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner had not 
yet assumed the particle '' de," so proudly worn in later 
years when, too, he is labelled in the directory *' homme- 
de-lettres," the title of " imprimeur/' on which he 
prided himself because it meant wealth, having lasted 
only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of 1828. 
Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous 
sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,- 
000 francs; a burden that nearly broke his back and 
his heart for many years. He never went through that 
narrow street without groaning for its memories ; and 
for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted 
to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of " La Peau 



330 THE STONES OF PARIS 

de Chagrin." In his '' Illusions Perdues " he has 
painted, in relentless detail, the cruel capacity of un- 
paid, or partially paid, debts for piling up interest. But 
the helpless despair of David Sechard was, in Balzac 
himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never 
deserted him for long. To pay his debts, he toiled as 
did Walter Scott, whom Balzac admired for this bond- 
age to rectitude, as he admired his genius. All through 
the *' Comedie Humaine " he dwells on the burden of 
debt, the ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, 
by dishonorable, expedients. 

On an upper floor of his establishment, Balzac had 
fitted up a small but elegant apartment for his living- 
place, his first attempt to realize that ideal of a bachelor 
residence such as those in which he installed his heroes. 
This was furnished, of course, on credit, and when fail- 
ure came, he removed his belongings to a room at 
No. 2 Rue de Tournon, a house quite unchanged to-day. 
Here his neighbor was the editor of the " Figaro," 
Henri de la Touche — his intimate friend then, later his 
intimate enemy ; a poor creature eaten by envy, whose 
specialty it was to turn against former friends and to 
sneer at old allies. 

Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former 
room over his works, '' Les Chouans." It was pub- 
lished in 1829, and was the first to bear his real name as 
author, the first to show to the reading world of what 
sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content 
with the book, good as it was, and he retouched and bet- 
tered it in after years. It brought him not only readers 



THE PARIS OF HO NO RE DE BALZAC 33 1 

but editors and publishers ; and before the end of 1830, 
he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and studies ; 
among them such works as " La Maison du Chat-qui- 
pelote," "Physiologie du Mariage," ''Gobseck," "Etude 
de Femme," " Une Passion dans le Desert," " Un Epi- 
sode sous la Terreur," " Catherine de Medicis," '' Let- 
tres sur Paris " — with " Les Chouans," seventy in all ! 

Werdet,one of Balzac's publishers — his sole publisher 
from 1834 to 1837 — lived and had his shop near by, at 
No. 49 Rue de Seine. To his house, just as it stands 
to-day, the always impecunious young author used to 
come, morning, noon, and night for funds, in payment 
of work unfinished, of work not yet begun, often of 
work never to be done. 

From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to 
Rue Cassini, No. i, as we find it given in the Paris 
Bottin of that year. It is a short street of one block, 
running from Avenue de I'Observatoire to Rue du Fau- 
bourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately 
from the Italian astronomer, who was installed in the 
Observatory, having been made a citizen of France by 
Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister. It is a 
secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and 
its own village atmosphere. In 183 1 it was really a vil- 
lage, far from town, and these streets were only coun- 
try lanes, bordered by infrequent cottages, dear to the 
weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three of 
them, near together here, harbored famous men at 
about this period, and all three have remained intact 
until lately for the delight of the pilgrim — that of Cha- 



332 THE STONES OF PARIS 

teaubriand, No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of 
Victor Hugo, No. 2J Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 
and this one of Balzac. His house, destroyed only in 
1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue du Faubourg- 
Saint- Jacques and Rue Cassini. It was a little cottage 
of two stories, with two wings and a small central body, 
giving on a tiny court. A misguided Paris journal has 
claimed, with copious letterpress and illustrations, the 
large building at No. 6 Rue Cassini for Balzac's abode. 
This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with in 
topographical research, by which the traditions of a 
demolished house are transplanted to an existing neigh- 
bor. This characterless No. 6 carries its own proof 
that Balzac could never have chosen it, even were we 
without the decisive proof given by the cadastre of the 
city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenotre among the 
buried archives of the Bureau des Contributions Di- 
rectes. 

In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac 
and his friend, Auguste Borget; in the other wing, 
Jules Sandeau lived alone and lonely in his recent sepa- 
ration from George Sand. Their separation was not 
so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, 
and an occasional dinner to her by the three men. She 
has described one of these wonderful dinners with much 
humor; telling how Balzac, when she started for her 
home — then on Quai Malaquais — arrayed himself in 
a fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany 
her ; boasting, as they went, of the four Arabian horses 
he was about to buy ; which he never bought, but which 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC ^ZZ 



he quite convinced himself, if not her, that he already 
owned ! Says Madame Dudevant : " He would, if we 
had permitted him, have thus escorted us from one end 
of Paris to the other." He so far realized his vision as 
to set up a tilbury and horse at this period — about 1832 
— and exulted in the sensation created by his magnifi- 
cence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with 
shining buttons, and attended by his tiny groom, 
" Grain-de-mil!' 

This equipage and that gorgeous dressing-gown were 
but a portion of the bizarre splendor with which Balzac 
loved to relieve the squalor of his debt-ridden days. 
Here, his creditors forgetting, by them forgotten, as he 
fondly hoped, hiding from his friends the furniture he 
had salvaged from his wreck, he wantoned in silver toi- 
let-appliances, in dainty porcelain and bric-a-brac ; 
willing to go without soup and meat — never without 
his coffee — that he might fill, with egregious bibelots, 
his " nest of boudoirs a la marquise, hung with silk and 
edged with lace," to use George Sand's words; bou- 
doirs which he has described in minute detail, placing 
them in the preposterous apartment of " La Fille aux 
Yeux d'Or." 

In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and se- 
vere, he began that series of volumes, amazing in num- 
ber and vigor, with which he was resolute to pay his 
enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the years 
between 183 1 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty 
others of less note, such masterpieces as " La Peau de 
Chagrin," " Le Chef d'CEuvre Inconnu," " Le Cure de 



334 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Tours/' '' Louis Lambert," '' Eugenie Grandet," " Le 
Medecin de Campagne," " Le Pere Goriot," '' La 
Duchesse de Langeais/' " Illusion Perdues " (first part 
only), " Le Lys dans la Vallee," " L'Enfant Maudit," 
" Cesar Birotteau," " Cent Contes Drolatiques " (in 
three sections), " Seraphita," '' La Femme de Trente 
Ans," and '' Jesus-Christ en Flandres." 

In addition to his books, he did journalistic writing, 
chiefly for weekly papers ; and in 1835 he bought up and 
took charge of the '' Chronique de Paris," aided by a 
gallant staff of the cleverest men of the day. It lived 
only a few months. In 1840 he started " La Revue 
Parisienne," written entirely by himself. It lived three 
months. 

When once at work, Balzac shut himself in his room, 
often seeing no one but his faithful servant for many 
weeks. His work-room was darkened from all day- 
light, his table lit only by steady-flamed candles, shaded 
with green. A cloistered monk of fiction, he was clad 
in his favorite robe of white cashmere, lined with white 
silk, open at the throat, with a silken cord about the 
waist, as we see him on the canvas of Louis Boulanger. 
He would get to his table at two in the morning and 
leave it at six in the evening; the entire time spent in 
writing new manuscript, and in his endless correction 
of proofs, except for an hour at six in the morning, 
for his bath and coffee, an hour at noon for his frugal 
breakfast, with frequent coffee between-times. At six 
in the evening he dined most simply, and was in bed 
and asleep by eight o'clock. 




Honore de Balzac. 

(From the portrait by Louis Boulanger.) 



{Prom a carbon print by Braun, Clement &* Co.'] 



i 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 335 



With no inborn literary facility, with an inborn artis- 
tic conscience that drove him on in untiring pursuit of 
perfection, he filled the vast chasm between his thought 
and its expression with countless pen-strokes, and by 
methods of composition all his own : the exact reverse of 
those of Dumas, writing at white heat, never rewriting ; 
or of Hugo, who said : " I know not the art of solder- 
ing an excellence in the place of a defect, and I correct 
myself in another work." Balzac began with a short 
and sketchy and slip-shod skeleton, making no attempt 
toward sequence or style, and sent it, with all its errors, 
to the printer. Proofs were returned to him in small 
sections pasted in the centre of huge sheets; around 
whose wide borders soon shot from the central text 
rockets and squibs of the author's additions and cor- 
rections, fired by his infuriated fist. The new proofs 
came back on similar sheets, to be returned to the 
printer, again like the web and tracks of a tipsy spider. 
This was repeated a dozen or, it is said, a score of times, 
always with amplifications, until his type-setters became 
palsied lunatics. He overheard one of them, as he en- 
tered the office one day, say : " I've done my hour of 
Balzac ; who takes him next ? " Type-setter, pub- 
lisher, author were put out of misery only when the last 
proof came in, at its foot the magic '' Bon a tirerf' 

This stupendous work had been preceded and was 
accompanied by as stupendous preparation of details. 
He dug deep to set the solid foundations for each struct- 
ure he meant to build. *' I have had to read so many 
books," he says, referring to his preliminary toil on 



336 THE STONES OF PARIS 

" Louis Lambert." So real were his creations to him — 
more aUve to his vision than visible creatures about — 
that he must needs name them fittingly, and house them 
appropriately. Invented nomenclature gave no vitality 
to them, in his view, and he hunted, on signs and shop- 
fronts wherever he went, for real names that meant life, 
and a special life. '' A name," as he said, " which ex- 
plains and pictures and proclaims him ; a name that 
shall be his, that could not possibly belong to any other." 
He revelled in his discovery of " Matifat," and '' Car- 
dot," and like oddities. He dragged Leon Gozlan 
through miles of streets on such a search, refusing 
every name they found, until he quivered and colored 
before " Marcas " on a tailor's sign ; it was the name 
he had dreamed of, and he put " Z " before it, '' to add 
a flame, a plume, a star to the name of names ! " 

His scenes, too, were set for his personages with ap- 
palling care, so that, as has been well said, he some- 
times chokes one with brick and mortar. He knew his 
Paris as Dickens knew his London, and found in un- 
known streets or unfrequented quarters the scenes he 
searched long for, the surroundings demanded by his 
characters. If his story were placed in a provincial 
town, he would write to a friend living there for a map 
of the neighborhood, and for accurate details of certain 
houses. Or, he would make hurried journeys to distant 
places : " I am off to Grenoble," or, " to Alenqon " — 
he wrote to his sister — '* where So-and-so lives : " one 
of his new personages, already a living acquaintance to 
him. In his artistic frenzy for fitting atmosphere he 



THE PARIS OF HO NO RE DE BALZAC 331 

has, unconsciously, breathed his spirit of unrest into 
much of his narrative, and the reader plunges on, out- 
of-breath, through chapterless pages of fatiguing detail. 

These excursions were not his only outings in later 
years. He got away from his desk during the summer 
months, for welcome journeys to his own Touraine, and 
to other lands, and for visits to old family friends. Al- 
ways and everywhere he carried his work with him. 

And he began to see the world of Paris, and to be 
seen in that world, notably in the famous salon of Emile 
de Girardin and his young wife, Delphine Gay de 
Girardin, where the watchword was " Admiration, 
more admiration, and still more admiration." He met 
well-bred women and illustrious men, whose familiar 
intercourse polished him, whose attentions gratified 
him. The pressure of his present toil removed for a 
while, he was fond of emerging from his solitude, and 
of flashing in the light of publicity. He was an inter- 
ested and an interesting talker, earnest and vehement 
and often excited in his utterances; yet frank and 
merry, and vivid with a " Herculean joviality." His 
thick fine black hair was tossed back like a mane from 
his noble, towering brow ; his nose was square at the 
end, his lips full and curved, and hidden partly by a 
small mustache. His most notable features were his 
eyes, brown, spotted with gold, glowing with life and 
light — " the eyes of a sovereign, a seer, a subjugator." 
A great soul shone out of them, and they redeemed and 
triumphed over all that was heavy in face and vulgar in 
body ; for, with a thickness of torso like Mirabeau, and 



338 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the neck of a bull, he had his own corpulence. Lamar- 
tine says that the personal impression made by Balzac 
was that of an element in nature ; he gripped one's brain 
when speaking, and one's heart when silent. Moreover, 
it was an element good as well as strong, unable to be 
other than good ; and his expression, we know from all 
who saw it, told of courage, patience, gentleness, kindli- 
ness. 

He was commonly as careless of costume as a vagrant 
school-boy in outgrown clothes. He would rush from 
his desk to the printer's or race away in search of names, 
clad in his green hunting- jacket with its copper but- 
tons of foxes' heads, black and gray checked trousers, 
pleated at the waist, and held down by straps passing 
under the huge high-quartered shoes, tied or untied as 
might happen, a red silk kerchief cord-like about his 
neck, his hat, shaggy and faded, crushed over his eyes 
— altogether a grotesque creature ! In contrast, he was 
gorgeous in his gala toilet of the famous blue coat and 
massive gold buttons, and the historic walking-stick, 
always carried en grande tenue, its great knob aglow 
with jewels sent him by his countless feminine adorers. 

When Balzac removed with Sandeau, in 1838, to 
new quarters, he kept this apartment in Rue Cassini 
for an occasional retreat, perhaps for a friendly refuge 
against the creditors, who became more and more clam- 
orous in their attentions. The two comrades furnished 
the lower floor of their new home most handsomely ; 
mainly with the view of dazzling urgent publishers, 
who, as said Balzac, " would give me nothing for my 



THE PARIS OF HO NO RE DE BALZAC 339 

books if they found me in a garret." Coming to drive 
a bargain, these guileless gentry found themselves too 
timid to haggle with the owners of such luxury. They 
could not know that that luxury was merely hired under 
cover of a friend's name, and lit up only by night to 
blind and bewilder them, while the haughty authors 
lived by day in bare discomfort, on a half-furnished 
upper floor. 

Of this mansion only the site remains. It was at No. 
17 Rue des Battailles, on the heights of Chaillot — the 
suburb between Paris and Passy — and that street and 
the Balzac house have been cut away by the modern 
Avenue d'lena. Retired and high as it was, with its 
grand view over river and town, it was not high enough 
nor far enough away for this lover of distance and 
height. He soon tried again to realize his ideal of a 
country home by buying, in 1838, three acres of land 
at Ville d'Avray, a quarter near Sevres, on the road to 
Versailles. On the ground was a small cottage called, 
in Louis XIV.'s time, '' Les Jardies," still known by 
that name, and notable in our time as the country- 
home of Leon Gambetta, wherein he died. That home 
remains exactly as he left it, at No. 14 Rue Gambetta, 
Ville d'Avray, and has been placed among the National 
Monuments of France. It is a shrine for the former 
followers of the great tribune, who visit it on each 
anniversary of his death. The statue they have erected 
to their leader, alongside the house, may be most kindly 
passed by in silence. 

The glorious view from this spot — embracing the 



340 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



valley of Ville d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great 
city in the distance — was a delight to Balzac. Les Jar- 
dies was a tiny box, having but three rooms in its two 
stories, which communicated by a ladder-like staircase 
outside. He had tried to improve the place by a partial 
rebuilding, and the stairs were forgotten until it was 




Les Jardies. 

too late to put them inside. A later tenant has enclosed 
that absurd outer staircase within a small addition. 
His garden walls gave him even more trouble, for they 
crumbled and slid down on the grounds of an irate 
neighbor. The greater part of that garden has been 
walled of¥. Yet the poor little patch was a domain in 
his eyes ; its one tree and scattered shrubs grew to a 



THE PARIS OF HO NO RE DE BALZAC 34 1 

forest in his imagination, and his fancy pictured, in that 
confined area, a grand plantation of pineapples, from 
which he was to receive a yearly income of 400,000 
francs ! He had fixed on the very shop on the boule- 
vards where they were to be sold, and only Gautier's 
cold sense prevented the great planter, as he saw him- 
self, from renting it before he had grown one pineapple ! 

His rooms were almost bare of furniture, and this 
was suggested by his stage directions charcoaled on 
the plaster walls : *' Rosewood panels," " Gobelins 
tapestries," " Venetian mirror," '' An inlaid cabinet 
stands here," " Here hangs a Raphael." Thus he was 
content to camp for four or five years, hoping his house 
would yet be furnished, and perhaps believing it was 
already furnished. 

At this time, and for many years, Balzac rented a 
room over the shop of his tailor Buisson, at the present 
No. 112 Rue de Richelieu. His letters came here al- 
ways, and he used the place not only for convenience 
when in town, but, in connection with other shelters, 
for his unceasing evasion of pursuing creditors. A 
tailor still occupies that shop, and seems to be prosper- 
ous; probably able to collect his bills from prompter 
customers than was Balzac. 

In 1843, forced to sell Les Jardies, he came back into 
the suburbs, to a house then No. 19 Rue Basse, at Passy, 
now No. 47 Rue Raynouard of that suburb. On the 
opposite side of the street, at No. 40, is a modest house, 
hiding behind its garden-wall. This was the unpre- 
tending home of "" Beranger, poete a Passy/' to quote 



342 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the Paris Bottin. No. 47 is a plain bourgeois dwelling 
of two stories and attic, wide and low, standing on the 
line of the street ; in the rear is a court, and behind that 
court is the pavilion occupied by Balzac. He had en- 
trance from the front, and unseen egress by a small gate 
on the narrow lane sunk between walls, now named Rue 
Berton, and so by the quay into town. This was a need 
for his furtive goings and comings, at times. 

Balzac's work-room here looked out over a superb 
panorama — across the winding Seine, over the Champ- 
de-Mars, and the Invalides' dome, and all southern 
Paris, to the hills of Meudon in the distance. This room 
he kept austerely furnished, as was his way ; while the 
living apartments were crowded with the extraordinary 
collection of rare furniture, pictures, and costly trifles, 
which he had begun again to bring together. To it he 
gave all the money he could find or get credit for, and 
as much thought and labor and time as to his books, 
although with little of the knowledge that might have 
saved him from frequent swindlers. It was only his 
intimates who were allowed to enter these rooms, and 
they needed, in order to enter them, or the court or the 
house on the street, many contrivances and passwords, 
constantly changed. He himself posed as '' la Veuve 
Durand," or as "" Madame de Bruguat/' and each vis- 
itor had to ask for one of these fictitious persons ; stat- 
ing, with cheerful irrelevancy : " The season of plums 
has arrived," or, " I bring laces from Belgium." Once 
in, they found free-hearted greeting and full-handed 
hospitality, and occasional little dinners. The good 



THE PARIS OF HON ORE DE BALZAC 343 

cheer was more toothsome to the favored convives, 
than were the cheap acrid wines, labelled with grand 
names, made drinkable only by the host's fantastic 
fables of their vintages and their voyages; believed 
by him, at least, who dwelt always in his own domain 
of dreams. 

These dinners were not extravagant, and there was 
no foolish expenditure in this household at Passy. Bal- 
zac wrote later to his niece, that his cooking there had 
been done only twice a week, and in the days between 
he was content with cold meat and salad, so that each 
inmate had cost him only one franc a day. For this 
man of lavish outlay for genuine and bogus antiques, 
this slave to strange extravagances and colossal debts 
— partly imaginary — was painfully economical in his 
treatment of himself. He thought of money, he wrote 
about money. Before him, love had been the only pas- 
sion allowed in novels ; he put money in its place and 
found romance in the Code. All through his life he 
worked for money to pay his debts, intent on that one 
duty. In October, 1844, he wrote two letters, within 
one week, to the woman who was to be his wife ; in one 
of them he says that his dream, almost realized, is to 
earn before December the paltry twenty thousand 
francs that would free him from all debt ; in the other 
he gloats over recent purchases of hric-a-brac, amount- 
ing to hundreds of francs. He saw nothing comically 
inconsistent in the two letters. 

In all his letters, the saddest reading of all letters, 
there is this curious commingling of the comic and the 



344 THE STONES OF PARIS 

sordid. Those, especially, written to his devoted sister 
and to the devoted lady who became his wife at the 
last, give us most intimate acquaintance with the man ; 
showing a man, indeed, strong and vehement, steadfast 
and patient ; above all, magnanimous. Self-assertive in 
his art, eager and insistent concerning it, he was quite 
without personal envy or self-seeking. Said Madame 
Dudevant : " I saw him often under the shock of great 
injustices, literary and personal, and I never heard him 
say an evil word of anyone." Nor was there any evil 
in his life — a life of sobriety and of chastity, as well 
as of toil. At the bottom of his complex nature lay a 
deep natural affection. This giant of letters, when 
nearly fifty years old, signed his letters to his mother, 
*' Ton ais soumis" ; so expressing truly his feeling for 
her, from the day she had installed him in his mean 
garret, to that later day, when she fitted up his grand 
last mansion. In his letters to those dear to him, amid 
clamorous outcries about debts and discomforts, comes 
a deeper cry for sympathy and affection. Early in life, 
he wrote to his sister : '' My two only and immense de- 
sires — to be famous and to be loved — will they ever be 
satisfied ? " To a friend he wrote : " All happiness de- 
pends on courage and work." So, out of his own 
mouth, we may judge this man in all fairness. 

From this Passy home one night, Balzac and The- 
ophile Gautier went to the apartment of Roger de Beau- 
voir, in the Hotel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on the Island 
of Saint-Louis; and thence the three friends took a 
short flight into a hashish heaven. Their strange ex- 



THE PARIS OF HO NO RE DE BALZAC 345 

periences have been told by their pens, but to us, Bal- 
zac's night of drugged dreams is not so strange as his 
days of unforced dreams. That which attracts us in 
this incident is its scene — one of the grandest of the 
mansions that sprang up from the thickets of lie Saint- 
Louis, as le Menteur has put it. Built in the middle 
years of the seventeenth century, it stands quite un- 
changed at No. 17 Quai d'Anjou, bearing, simply and 
effectively, every mark of Mansart's hand in his later 
years. Its first owner followed his friend Fouquet to 
the Bastille and to Pignerol ; its next tenant came to it 
from a prison-cell, and went from it to the very steps 
of the throne. He was the superb adventurer, Antonin 
Nompar de Caumont, Due de Lauzun, and his family 
name clings still to the place, and is cut in gold letters 
on the black marble tablet above the door. On that 
prettiest balcony in Paris, crowded the prettiest women 
of Paris, on summer nights, to look at the river fetes 
got up by their showy and braggart Gascon host. 
Through this portal have passed Bossuet and Pere 
Lachaise, going in to convert the plain old Huguenot 
mother of de Lauzun, who lived retired in her own 
isolated chamber through the years of her son's ups 
and downs. When her family had gone, came the 
Marquis de Richelieu, great-nephew of the great Rich- 
elieu, with the bride he had stolen from her convent 
at Chaillot — the daughter of Hortense Mancini, niece 
of Mazarin, and of her husband, it is alleged. Then 
came the Pimodan, who was first of that name, and 
who gave It to his hotel. It is an admirable relic; its 



34^ THE STONES OF PARIS 

rooms, with their frescoed ceiHngs and their panelled 
walls, are as remarkable as those of the chateau of Fon- 
tainebleau, and are not surpassed by any in Paris. The 
mansion is well worth a visit for itself and for its 
memories. 

Balzac's Paris — the Paris for which his pen did what 
Callot and Meryon did for it with their needles — has 
been almost entirely pickaxed out of sight and remem- 
brance. The Revolution, wild-eyed in its mad " Car- 
magnole," gave itself time to raze a few houses only, 
after clearing the ground of the Bastille, although it 
had meant much more destruction; the Empire cut 
some new streets, and planned some new quarters ; the 
Bourbons came back and went away again, leaving 
things much as they had found them. It remained 
for Louis-Philippe to begin *' works of public utility," 
an academic phrase, which being interpreted signified 
the tearing down of the old and the building up of the 
new, to gratify the grocers and tallow-chandlers whose 
chosen King he was, and to fill his own pocket. Yet 
much of Balzac's stage-setting remained until it was 
swept away by Haussmann and his master of the Sec- 
ond Empire. Such was the wretched Rue du Doyenne, 
that '' narrow ravine " between the Louvre and Place 
du Carrousel, where Baron Hulot first saw la Marneife, 
and where la Cousine Bette kept guard over her Polish 
artist in his squalid garret; doubtless the very garret 
known to Balzac in his visits there, when it was ten- 
anted by Arsene Houssaye, Gautier, Gavarni, and the 
rest of " Young France, harmless in its furies." That 



THE PARIS OP HONORE DE BALZAC 347 



house, one of a block of black old eighteenth-century 
structures, stood where now is the trim little garden 
behind the preposterous statue of Gambetta. 

History and fiction meet on the steps of Saint-Roch. 
There Cesar Birotteau, the ambitious and unlucky per- 
fumer, was " wounded by Napoleon," on the /j Ven- 
demiaire, the day that put the young Corsican's foot 
into the stirrup, and gave to the sham-heroic Cesar 
that sounding phrase, always thereafter doing duty on 
his tongue. He was carried to his shop in Rue Saint- 
Honore, on its northern side near Rue de Castiglione, 
and hid and bandaged and nursed in his entresol. This 
part of Rue Saint-Honore and its length eastward, with 
its narrow pavement and its tall, thin houses, is still a 
part of the picture Balzac knew and painted ; but the 
business district hereabout has greatly changed since his 
day. The Avenue de I'Opera, and all that mercantile 
quarter dear to the American pocket, the Bourse and 
the banking-houses about, date from this side of his 
Paris. Nucingen would be lost in his old haunts, and 
Lucien de Rubempre could not recognize the news- 
paper world of our day. 

The hotels of the Faubourg Saint-Germain— the 
splendid mansions of the splendid eighteenth century, 
where his Rastignac and his lesser pet swells lorded it 
— are now, in many cases, let out in apartments, their 
owners content with the one floor that is in keeping 
with their diminished fortunes. Undiminished, how- 
ever, are their traditions and their prejudices, albeit 
*' Le Faubourg" exists no longer, except as an atti- 



348 THE STONES OF PARIS 

tude of mind. Yet, here on the left bank, are still to 
be found some of the scenes of the " Comedie Hu- 
maine." On Quai Voltaire, alongside the house in 
which Voltaire died, is the very same shop of the an- 
tiquary, from whom Raphael de Valentin bought the 
peau de chagrin. Balzac knew it well, doubtless was 
swindled there, and to-day you will find it as crowded 
with curiosities, as begrimed with dust, as sugges- 
tive of marvels hid in its dusky corners, as when he 
haunted it. 

Raphael de Valentin lived in the hotel-garni Saint- 
Quentin, Rue des Cordiers. Long before his day, Rous- 
seau had been a tenant of a dirty room in the same dirty 
hotellerie, going there because of the scholarly neigh- 
borhood of the place and of its memories, even at that 
time. Leibnitz, in 1646, had found it a village inn in a 
narrow lane, hardly yet a street. Gustave Planche lived 
there, and Hegesippe Moreau died there in 1838 — a 
true poet, starved to death. The old inn and all its 
memories and the very street are vanished; and the 
new buildings of the Sorbonne cover their site. 

" One of the most portentous settings of the scene 
in all the literature of fiction. In this case there is 
nothing superfluous ; there is a profound correspond- 
ence between the background and the action." Such' 
is the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Henry 
James, concerning the house in which is played the 
poignant tragedy of " Pere Goriot." You will, if you 
love Balzac, own to the truth of this statement, when 
you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It stands. 




The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the 
house where Voltaire died. 



THE PARIS OF HO NO RE DE BALZAC 349 

absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue 
Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great 
botanist who cleared the track for Linnaeus. In Bal- 
zac's day, this street was known by its original name of 
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve ; one of the most ancient and 
most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, 
through the centuries, has its immemorial quiet been 
broken by unseemly noise, when, in the days of Fran- 
cois I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the '' Tripot des 
11,000 Diahles," did its utmost to justify its name. 
The street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, 
over the brow of Mont-Sainte-Genevieve, away from 
the Paris of shops and cabs and electric light. The 
house stands narrow on the street, its gable window 
giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched gar- 
ret ; framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the 
old man, looking out in mute bewilderment on his self- 
ish, worldly daughters. The place no longer holds the 
'' pension bourgeoise de deux sexes et aiitres " of the 
naive description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, 
nee Conflans ; and is now let out to families and single 
tenants. Its gate-way stands always open, and you 
may enter without let or hindrance into the court, and 
so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of 
Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. 
You peep into the small, shabby salle-a-manger, on 
the entrance floor of the house, and you seem to see 
the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of the 
gens-d'armes, and, cowering before him, the vicious 
old maid who has betrayed him. That colossal con- 



3SO 



THE STONES OF PARIS 3 



ception of the great romancer had found his ideal hid- 
ing-place here, as had the forlorn father his hiding- 
place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is 




The Pension Vauquer. 

no more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction ; 
sought out and selected by Balzac with as much care 
and as many journeys as Dickens gave to his hunt for 
exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally Brass. 
While Balzac was still at Passy, after long searching 



THE PARIS OF HONOR E DE BALZAC 35 1 



for a new home, he made purchase, as early as 1846, in 
the new quarter near the present Pare Monceaux. That 
name came from an estate hereabout, once owned by 
PhiHppe EgaHte ; and his son, the King of the French, 
and the shrewdest speculator among the French, was 
just at this time exploiting this estate, in company with 
lesser speculators. The whole suburb was known as 
the Quartier Beau j on, from a great banker of the eigh- 
teenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own 
grounds, had been partly demolished by the cutting of 
new streets, leaving only out-buildings and a pavilion 
in a small garden. This was the place bought by Bal- 
zac ; the house and grounds, dear as they were, cost- 
ing much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, 
porcelains, and pottery, paintings and their frames — all 
minutely described in the collection of le cousin Pons. 
He made a museum, indeed, of this house, bringing out 
all his hidden treasures from their various conceal- 
ments here and there about town. There was still a 
pretence of poverty regarding his new home ; he would 
say to his friends, amazed by the display : " Nothing 
of all this is mine. I have furnished this house for a 
friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and 
doorkeeper of this hotel/' 

The pretty mystery was resolved within a few 
months, and its solution explained Balzac's frequent 
and long absences from Paris after the winter of 1842- 
43. These months had been passed at the home of Ma- 
dame Eve de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be 
his wife. Her home was in the grand chateau of Wierz- 



352 THE STONES OF PARIS 

chownie, in the Ukraine, whose present owner keeps 
unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where 
is hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de 
Hanska from her lover. And from there he brought his 
bride to Paris in the summer of 1850, their marriage 
dating from March of that year, after many years of 
waiting in patient affection. She had made over — with 
Balzac's cordial consent — nearly the whole of her great 
fortune to her daughter, her only child, and to that 
daughter's husband, retaining but a small income for 
herself. It was — and the envious world owned that it 
was — truly a love-match. They came home to be wel- 
comed, first of all, by Balzac's aged mother ; who had, 
during his absence, taken charge of all the preparations, 
with the same anxious, loving care she had given to the 
fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had 
carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of 
the flowers in the various rooms, the countless direc- 
tions he had sent from every stage of the tedious jour- 
ney from Wierzchownie. 

" And so, the house being finished, death enters," 
goes the Turkish proverb. This undaunted mariner, 
after his stormy voyage, gets into port and is ship- 
wrecked there. His premonition of early years, written 
to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: " I 
foresee the darkest of destinies for myself ; that will be 
to die when all that I now wish for shall be about to 
come to me." As early as in the preceding summer of 
1849, h^ had ceased to conceal from himself any longer 
the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. 



THE PARIS OF HO NO RE DE BALZAC 353 



The long years of unbroken toil, of combat without 
pause, of stinted sleep, of insufficient food, of inade- 
quate exercise, of the steady stimulation of coffee, had 
broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk. 
Years before, he had found that the inspiration for 
work given by coffee had lessened in length and 
strength. " It now excites my brain for only fifteen 
days consecutively," he had complained; protesting 
that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the 
same stimulus ! So he spurred himself on, listening to 
none of the warnings of worn nature nor of watchful 
friends. " Well, we won't talk about that now," was 
always his answer. '' In the olden days," says Sainte- 
Beuve, " men wrote with their brains ; but Balzac 
wrote, not only with his brains, but with his blood." 
And now, he went to pieces all at once ; his heart and 
stomach could no longer do their work; his nerves, 
once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, 
and snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed 
him. The most pitiful words ever penned by a man-of- 
letters were scrawled by him, at the end of a note writ- 
ten by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after their 
home-coming : " Je ne puis ni lire ni ecrire." 

" On the i8th August, 1850 " — writes Hugo in 
" Choses Vues " — " my wife, who had been during the 
day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that Balzac was 
dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with 
us, but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took 
a cab to Rue Fortunee, Quartier Beau j on, where M. de 
Balzac lived. He had bought what remained of the 



354 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



hotel of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of which had 
escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had 
made a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with 
a porte-cochere on the street, and in place of a garden, 
a long, narrow, paved court-yard, with flower-beds 
about it here and there.'^ 

It was to No. 14, Alice Fortunee, that Hugo drove. 
That suburban lane is now widened into Rue Balzac, 




and where it meets Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honore 
there is a bit of garden-wall, and set in it is a tablet 
recording the site of this, Balzac's last home. The 
house itself has quite vanished, but one can see, above 
that wall, the upper part of a stone pavilion with Greek 
columns, built by him, it is believed. 

" I rang," continues Hugo ; " the moon was veiled 
by clouds ; the street deserted. No one came. I rang 



1 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 355 

again. The gate opened; a woman came forward, 
weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the 
salon, which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal 
opposite the fireplace was the colossal bust by David. 
A wax-candle was burning on a handsome oval table in 
the middle of the room. . . . We passed along a 
corridor, and up a staircase carpeted in red, and 
crowded with works of art of all kinds — vases, pictures, 
statues, paintings, brackets bearing porcelains. . . . 
I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. 
de Balzac's bedroom. 

" The bed was in the middle of the room. M. de 
Balzac lay in it, his head supported by a mound of 
pillows, to which had been added the red damask cush- 
ions of the sofa. His face was purple, almost black, 
inclining to the right. The hair was gray, and cut 
rather short. His eyes were open and fixed. I saw 
his side face only, and thus seen, he was like Napoleon. 
... I raised the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. It 
was moist with perspiration. I pressed it ; he made no 
answer to the pressure. . . ." 

The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d'An- 
gers ; a reduced copy surmounts Balzac's tomb. His 
portrait, in water-color, painted, within an hour after 
his death, by Eugene Giraud, is a touching portrayal 
of the man, truer than any made during life, his widow 
thought. While long suffering had wasted, it had re- 
fined, his face, and into it had come youth, strength, 
majesty. It is the head of the Titan, who carried a 
pitiable burden through a life of brave labor. 



356 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Balzac's death was known in a moment, it would 
seem, to his creditors, and they came clamoring to the 
door, and invaded the house — a ravening horde, ran- 
sacking rooms and hunting for valuables. They drove 
the widow away, and she found a temporary home with 
Madame de Surville, at 47 Rue des Martyrs. This 
house and number are yet unchanged. Cabinets and 
drawers were torn open, and about the grounds were 
scattered his letters and papers, sketches of new stories, 
drafts of contemplated work — all, that could be, col- 
lected by his friends, also hurrying to the spot. They 
found manuscripts in the shops around, ready to en- 
wrap butter and groceries. One characteristic and most 
valuable letter was tracked to three places, in three 
pieces, by an enthusiast, who rescued the first piece just 
as it was twisted up and ready to light a cobbler's pipe. 

'' He died in the night," continues Hugo. '' He was 
first taken to the Chapel Beau j on. . . . The funeral 
service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. As I 
stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second 
daughter had been baptized. I had not been in the 
church since. . . . The procession crossed Paris, and 
went by way of the boulevards to Pere-Lachaise. Rain 
was falling as we left the church, and when we reached 
the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heav- 
ens seemed to weep. We walked the whole distance. 
I was at the head of the coffin on the right, holding one 
of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre Dumas was 
on the other side. . . . When we reached the grave, 
which was on the brow of the hill, the crowd was im- 



THE PARIS OF HON'ORE DE BALZAC 357 

mense. . . . The coffin was lowered into the grave, 
which is near to those of Charles Nodier and Casimir 
Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few 
words. While I was speaking the sun went down. All 
Paris lay before me, afar off, in the splendid mists of 
the sinking orb, the glow of which seemed to fall into 
the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the sods 
dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words." 

Yes, stretched before his grave, lies all Paris, as his 
Rastignac saw it, when he turned from the fosses-com- 
munes, into which they had just thrown the body of 
Pere Goriot, and with his clinched fist flung out his 
grand defiance toward the great, beautiful, cruel city: 
''A noiis deux J maintenant ! '' 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 




The Figfure of d'Artagnan. 

(From the Dumas Monument, by Gustave Dore.) 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 

It was in 1823 that Alexandre Dumas, in his twenty- 
first year, took coach for Paris from his boyhood- 
home with his widowed mother, at Villers-Cotterets. 
He was set down at the principal landing-place of the 
provincial diligences in Place des Victoires, and found 
a room near by in an inn at No. 9 Rue du Bouloi. Its 
old walls are still there on the street and in the court, 
and the Hotel de Blois still awaits the traveller. Thence 
he started on foot, at once, for No. 64 Rue du Mont- 
Blanc, the home of the popular Liberal spokesman in 
the Chamber of Deputies, General Foy, an old com- 
rade-in-arms of General Dumas, to whom his son 
brought a letter of introduction. 

About that house, two years later, a few days after 
November 28, 1825, all Paris assembled, while all 
France mourned, for the burial of this honest man, 
whose earnest voice had been heard only in the cause 
of freedom and justice. Marked by a tablet, his house 
still stands, and is now No. 62 Rue de la Chaussee- 
dAntin — the renamed Rue du Mont-Blanc — on the 
corner of Rue de la Victoire. 

Besides this letter, young Dumas carried only a 

meagre outfit of luggage, and such meagre education 

361 



362 THE STONES OF PARIS 

as may be picked up by a clever and yet an idle lad, 
in a notary's office in a provincial town. Indeed, when 
he was made welcome by General Foy, he was ques- 
tioned, too ; and, to his chagrin, he was found to be 
without equipment for any sort of service. On the 
strength, however, of his '' belle ecritiire," he obtained, 
through the influence of the general, a petty clerkship 
in the household of the Due d'Orleans, coming naturally 
enough to the boy from Villers-Cotterets, the country- 
seat of the Orleans family. Its stipend of 1,200 francs 
a year was doubtless munificent in the eyes of Orleans 
thrift, and was certainly sufficient for the needs then 
of the future owner of Monte-Cristo's millions. He 
earned his wage and no more ; for his official pen — 
at his desk in the Palais-Royal — while doing its strict 
duty on official documents, was more gladly busied on 
his own studies and his own paper-spoiling. For the 
author within him had come to life with his first tramp- 
ing of the Paris streets and his first taking-in of all 
that they meant then. 

The babies, begotten by French fathers and mothers 
during the Napoleonic wars, and during those tre- 
mendous years at the end of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, breathed, full- 
lunged, an air of instant and intense vitality. Now, 
come to stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, 
eager to speed the coming of red-blooded Romanticism 
and the going of cold and correct Classicism, showed 
itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in litera- 
ture and the arts, after the sterility of so many years. 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 363 



When Dumas came to Paris, Lamartine had already, 
in 1820, charmed the pubHc by the freshness and grace 
of his " Meditations." His admirers were content 
with the sonorous surface of his vague, spiritual ex- 
altations, satisfied not to seek for any depth below. 
Hugo, barely twenty, had thrilled men with the sound- 
ing phrases of his " Odes et Ballades." These two, 
coming behind Chenier the herald and Chateaubriand 
the van-courier, were imposing pioneers of the great 
movement. Even more popular than these two Royal- 
ist poets, as they were regarded, was Casimir Dela- 
vigne — already installed over Dumas as Librarian at 
the Palais-Royal — rather a classicist in form, yet hailed 
as the poet and playwright of the Liberal Opposition. 
Soulie, not so well known now as he merits, won his 
first fame in 1824 by his poems and plays. De Vigny 
had brought out his earliest poems in 1822 ; and now, 
" isolated in his ivory tower," he was turning the 
periods of his admirable " Cinq-Mars." De Musset 
was getting ready to try his wings, and made his first 
open-air flight in 1828; a flight alone, for the poet of 
personal passion joined no flock, ever. Gautier was 
serving his apprenticeship to that poetic art, to whose 
service he gave a life-long devotion and the most per- 
fect craftsmanship in all France. 

" They all come from Chateaubriand," said Goethe, 
of these and of other rhymesters of that time. Cha- 
teaubriand himself had closed his career as poet and 
as imaginative writer as far back as 1809, and had 
by now taken his rank as a classic in literature, and 



364 THE STONES OF PARIS 

in life as a Peer of France and a Minister of the 
Bourbons. 

But of all the singers of that day it was to Beranger 
that the public ear turned most quickly and most 
kindly ; even though he, then forty-three years of age, 
might also seem to be of an earlier generation. Those 
others touched, with various fingers, the lyre or the 
lute ; he turned a most melodious hand-organ, with 
assured and showy art, and around it the captivated 
crowd loved to throng, with enraptured long ears. His 
cheaply sentimental airs were hummed and whistled 
all over France, and, known to everybody everywhere, 
there was really no need of his putting them in type 
on paper, and no need of his being sent to prison for 
that crime by Charles X. Yet he had his turn, soon 
again, and his chansons, as much as any utterance of 
man, upset the Bourbon throne and placed Louis- 
Philippe on that shaky seat. That most prosaic of 
monarchs was sung up to the throne, and the mis- 
guided poet soon found him out for what he was. 

In prose, during these years, Nodier, Librarian at 
the Arsenal, was plying his refined and facile pen. 
Merimee showed his hand in 1825, not to clasp, with 
any show of sympathy, the hand of any fellow-worker, 
yet willing tO' take his share of the strain. Guizot, 
out of active politics for a time, did his most notable 
pen-work between 1825 and 1830. His untiring an- 
tagonist, Thiers, not yet turned into the practical 
politician, produced, between 1823 and 1827, his '' His- 
tory of the French Revolution," voluminous and un- 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 365 



trustworthy ; its author energetically earning Carlyle's 
epithet, " a brisk little man in his way." His life-long 
crony, Mignet, was digging vigorously in dry, historic 
dust. Sainte-Beuve left, in 1827, his medical studies 
for those critical studies in which he soon showed the 
master's hand ; notably with his early paper on Hugo's 
" Odes et Ballades." Michelet was finding his metier 
by writing histories for children. The two Thierry 
brothers, Augustin and Amedee, proved the genuine 
historian's stuff in them as early as 1825. Balzac was 
working, alone and unknown, in his garret ; and young 
Sue was handling the naval surgeon's knife, before 
learning how to handle the pen. 

And nearly all of these, nearly all the fine young 
fellows who made the movement of 1830, had got in- 
spiration from Villemain, who had spoken, constantly 
and steadfastly, from his platform in the Sorbonne 
during the ten years from 1815 to 1825, those sturdy 
and graphic words which gave cheer and courage to 
so many. 

There were a similar vitality and fecundity in paint- 
ing and music and their sister arts, and the brilliant 
host stirring for their sake might be cited along with 
the unnumbered and unnamable pen-workers of this 
teeming decade. 

Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had pos- 
session, flooding the stage with his comedies, vaude- 
ville, opera-librettos, peopling its boards with his paste- 
board personages. There was call for revolt and need 
of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted 



S66 THE STONES OF PARIS 

to his very death to his art, longed to fill the role of a 
man on the boards, after so many years' impersonation 
of bloodless heroes. So he told Dumas, who had come 
to see him only two weeks before his death, in 1826, 
when the veteran thought he was recovering from ill- 
ness — an illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for 
it gave him, he pointed out with pride, the lean frame 
and pendent cheeks, " beautiful for old Tiberius " — 
the new part he was then studying. Death came with 
his cue before that role could be played. 

This wish for a real human being on the boards came 
home to Dumas, when he saw the true Shakespeare 
rendered by Macready and Miss Smithson at the Salle 
Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the reading 
before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more 
than any other influence. No Frenchman has com- 
prehended more completely than Dumas the English- 
man's universality, and he used to say that, after God, 
Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt 
to put live men and women on the stage, in " Christine," 
was crowded out by a poorer play of the same name, 
pushed by the powers behind the Comedie Frangaise. 
But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, 
was produced his '* Henri HI. et sa Cour," an in- 
stantaneous and unassailable success. He might have 
said, in the words of Henri IV. at Senlis, ** My hour 
has struck " ; for from that hour he went on in his 
triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama 
had come at last, with its superb daring, its sounding 
but spurious sentiment, its engorgement of adjectives, 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 367 



and its plentiful lack of all sense of the ludicrous. 
Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had 
been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of hu- 
mor, it had not gone stale so soon. 

Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, 
from the inn in Rue du Bouloi to another of the same 
sort just around the corner, Hotel des Vieux-Augus- 
tins, in the street of the same name — now widened 
and renamed Rue Herold. In the widening they have 
cut away his inn, at present No. 12, and that of ''La 
Providence;' next door at No. 14, where Charlotte 
Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty 
years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of 
the two hotels are covered by the rear buildings of 
the Caisse d'Epargne, which fronts on Rue du Louvre. 
One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these 
historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was 
born, on January 28, 1791, the musician Herold, com- 
poser of " Zampa " and '' Pre-aux-Clercs." Dumas 
lived for a while later at No. i Place des Italiens, now 
Place Boieldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought 
his good mother to town, and took rooms on the sec- 
ond floor of No. 53 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 
next door to the old cabaret, '' Au Lion d' Argent!' 
Mother and son soon after moved across the river, 
where he found for her a home in Rue Madame, and 
found for himself an apartment at No. 25 Rue de 
rUniversite, on the southeastern corner of Rue du Bac. 
There had been an illustrious tenant of this house, in 
1816 and 1817, who was named Chateaubriand. Du- 



368 THE STONES OF PARIS 

mas, in his " Memoires," gives both the third and the 
fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to feel Hke 
fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and 
he fitted up the rooms '' with a certain elegance." 
Shoppers at the big establishment, '' Au petit Saint- 
Thomas," may explore its annex and mount to Dumas's 
rooms in the house that now hides its stately facade 
and its entrance perron in the court behind modern 
structures. Here he remained from 1824 to 1833, 
making a longer stay than in any of the many camp- 
ing-places of his migratory career. And here he gave 
his name to his most memorable endowment to the 
French drama, in the person of his only son, born on 
July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother, Marie-Cath- 
erine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. i Place des 
Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 
17, 1 83 1, the father formally owned the son by Vacte 
de reconnaissance, signed and recorded at the office 
of the mayor of the Second Arrondissement, May 6, 
1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Du- 
mas, ais." 

Portions of the child's early life were passed with 
his father, but separations became more frequent and 
more prolonged, as the boy developed his own marked 
character — in striking contrast with that of the elder. 
Their mutual attitude came, before many years, to be 
as queer and as tragi-comic as any attitudes invented 
by either of them for the stage. The son used to say, 
in later life, that he seemed to be the elderly guardian 
and counsellor of the father — a happy-go-lucky, im- 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 369 



provident, chance child. For the son of the Parisienne 
had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his 
father's dramatic range, and this happy commingling 
of the stronger qualities of the parents gave him his 
special powers. 

The doings of the elder Dumas during the famous 
three days of July, 1830, would make an amusing 
chapter. Eager to play the part of his own boisterous 
heroes, he flung himself, with hot-headed and bom- 
bastic ardor, into throne-upsetting and throne-setting- 
up. Of course he allied himself with the opponents 
of Louis-Philippe — possibly in keen memory of his 
monthly hundred francs worth of drudgery— and of 
course the success of the Orleanists left him with no 
further chance for place or patronage. 

So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved it- 
self to be no broken reed, but a strong staff for sup- 
port. Strong as it was and unresting, no one pen 
could do even the manual labor required by the end- 
less volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having fin- 
ished '' Monte-Cristo," he followed it by " The Three 
Musketeers," and then he put out no less than forty 
volumes in that same year; each volume bearing his 
name as sole author. But this sturdy and undaunted 
toiler was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he 
was surrounded by clerks for research, secretaries for 
writing, young and unknown authors for collaborat- 
ing; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling 
touches that give warmth and color to the canvas 
signed by him. His " victims," as they are described 



370 THE STONES OF PARIS 

in the " Fabrique de Romans, Maison Alexandre Du- 
mas et Compagnie/' a malicious exposure, are hardly 
subjects for sympathy; they earned money not other- 
wise within their power to earn, and not one of them 
produced, before or after, any work of individual dis- 
tinction. In his historical romances, their work is 
evident in the study and research that give an accuracy 
not commonly credited to Dumas and about which he 
never bothered. The belle insouciance of his touch 
is to be seen in the dash of the narrative, and above all 
in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and 
fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he 
was paid by the line at a royal rate, and he learned 
the trick of making his lines too short and his dia- 
logues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as 
he went on, it must be owned that he used his name 
in unworthy ways, not only for books of no value and 
for journalistic paltriness, but for shameless signa- 
ture to shopkeepers' puffs, composed for coin. 

As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and 
poured out again as freely. For he was a spendthrift 
of the old regime, spending not only for his own 
caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and hang- 
ers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such 
as building his own theatre and running it; and he 
squandered fabulous sums in his desire to make real, 
at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for Monte- 
Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted 
hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until 
his favorite servant, under pretence of fear of the un- 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 31 t- 

lucky number thirteen, to which they had come, begged 
to be allowed to send some of them away. He gave up 
his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas 
ordered him to find a fourteenth dog ! He would have 
drained dry a king's treasury, and have bankrupted 
Monte-Cristo's island of buried millions. Yet with all 
his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous tom- 
foolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a 
manly joy in giving, that disarm stingy censure. The 
lover of the romancer must mourn for the man, grow- 
ing poorer as he grew older, and must regret the de- 
grading shifts at which he snatched for money, by 
which he sank to be a mountebank in his declining 
years. Toward the last his purse held fewer sous than 
it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them. 

From his eight years' home in Rue de TUniversite, 
Dumas crossed the Seine, preferring always thereafter 
the flashily fashionable quarters of the northern side; 
and none of his numerous dwellings henceforward are 
worth visiting for their character or color. For nearly 
two years he lived in a great mansion. No. 40 Rue 
Saint-Lazare, in other rooms of which George Sand 
lived a little later. His next home, from 1835 to 1837, 
at 30 Rue Bleue, has been cut away by Rue Lafayette. 
From 1838 to 1843 he had an apartment, occasionally 
shared by his son, at No. 22 Rue de Rivoli, between 
Place des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Roch. 

Twenty-five years after the death of the father, 
when the son, as he says, was older and grayer than 
his father had ever grown to be, a letter to him was 



372 THE STONES OF PARIS 

written by that son. It is an exquisite piece of litera- 
ture. He brings back their Hfe in this apartment, 
when, twenty-two years apart in their birth, they were 
really of the same age. He tells how he, a young man 
going early to his studies, left the elder at his desk, 
already at work at seven in the morning, clad only in 
trousers and shirt, the latter with open neck and rolled- 
up sleeves. At seven in the evening his son would find 
him planted there still at work, his mid-day breakfast 
often cold at his side, forgotten and untouched ! Then 
these two would dine, and dine well, for the father 
loved to play the cook, and he was a master of that 
craft. All the while he was preparing the plats he 
would prattle of his heroes, what they'd done that day, 
and what he imagined they might do on the next day. 
And then the letter calls back to the father that even- 
ing, a little later, when he was found by his son sunk 
in an armchair, red-eyed and wretched, and mourn- 
fully explained: *' Porthos is dead! I've just killed 
him, and I couldn't help crying over him ! " It must 
have been at this period that the romancer tried to 
secure his son as his permanent paid critic, offering 
him 25,000 francs a year, and " you'll have nothing to 
do but to make objections." The offer was declined, 
and rightly declined. 

It was in this and in his succeeding residences — 
Rue de Richelieu, 109, in 1844, and Rue de la Chaus- 
see-d'Antin, 45, in 1845 — that he brought out in news- 
paper fetiilletons " The Count of Monte-Cristo," and 
" The Three Musketeers," these amazing successes 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 373 



written from day to day to keep pace with the press. 
In 1846, while his address was at No. 10 Rue Joubert, 
he was in Spain with the Due de Montpensier, one of 
his many companions among princes. They, along 
with other cronies, male and female, more or less 
worthy, found Dumas at Saint-Germain from 1847 to 
1854. Then, suddenly, he disappeared into Belgium, 
" for reasons not wholly unconnected with financial re- 
verses," as he and his only peer in fiction, Micawber, 
would have put it. He was in town again in 1856, at 
No. yy Rue d'Amsterdam, and there remained until 
1866, when he rushed off to the head-quarters of the 
" Dictator of Sicily," Garibaldi, to whom Dumas ap- 
pointed himself aide and messenger. Between 1866 
and 1870 his residence was at 107 Boulevard Males- 
herbes. On the coming of the Prussians, he was car- 
ried, ailing and feeble, to his country-place at Puys, 
near Dieppe, where he died December 5, 1870. His 
public burial was delayed until the close of the war, 
and then, in 1872, was solemnized in the presence of 
all that was notable in French art and literature, at his 
birthplace and his boyhood-home, Villers-Cotterets. 

When Dumas was asked how a monument might be 
erected in memory of a dead pen-worker, who in life 
had been misunderstood and maligned, he replied: 
'' Use the stones thrown at him while he lived, and 
you'll have a tremendous monument." The lovers in 
all lands of the great romancer could well have brought 
together more telling stones than those that make 
Dore's monument in Place Malesherbes, near his last 



374 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Paris home. And yet, curiously weak in its general im- 
pression, its details are effective. The group in front 
is well imagined : a girl is reading to a young student, 
and to an old, barefooted workman ; on the other side 
is our hero d'Artagnan. The seated statue of Dumas, 
on too tall a pedestal, is an admirable portrait, with 
his own vigorous poise of head and gallant regard. 

In 1864 the American Minister to France, Mr. John 
Bigelow, breakfasted with Dumas at Saint-Gratien, 
near Paris, where the romancer was temporarily so- 
journing. It was toward the close of our Civil War, 
and he had a notion of going to the United States as 
war-correspondent for French papers, and to make 
another book, of course. Mr. Bigelow gives an ac- 
curate and admirable description of the host, as he 
greeted him at the entrance of his villa ; over six feet 
in height, corpulent, but well proportioned; a brown 
skin, a head low and narrow in front, enlarging as it 
receded, covered with crisp, bushy hair growing gray, 
thick lips, a large mouth, and enormous neck. Partly 
African and wholly stalwart, from his negress grand- 
mother, he would have been a handsome creature but 
for his rapidly retreating forehead. But in his features 
and his expression nothing showed that was sordid 
or selfish, and his smile was very sweet. 

Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love 
strength and daring, loyalty and generosity, good love- 
making and good fighting. He has put his own ten- 
derness and frankness and vivacity into the real per- 
sonages, whom he has reanimated and refined ; and 




Alexandre Dumas. 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 375 



into the ideal personages, whom he has made as real 
as the actual historic men and women who throng his 
thrilling pages. His own virility and lust of Hfe are 
there, too, without one prurient page in all his thou- 
sands. And he tells his delightful stories not only 
with charm and wit, but in clean-cut, straightforward 
words, with no making of phrases. 

Very little of the Valois Paris is left to-day, and 
the searcher for the scenery familiar to Margot and 
to Chicot must be content with what is left of the Old 
Louvre, and of the then new Renaissance Louvre as it 
was known to the grandchildren of its builder, Fran- 
cois L Of the old, the outer walls and the great cen- 
tral tower are outlined by light stones in the darker 
pavement of the southwest corner of the present court. 
Of the new structure, as we see it, the cold and cheer- 
less Salle des Caryatides Hghts up unwillingly to us 
with the brilliancy of the marriage festival of Mar- 
o-uerite de France and Henri de Navarre, as it is 
pictured by Dumas. This festivity followed the re- 
ligious ceremony, that had taken place under the grand 
portal of Notre-Dame, for Henry's heresy forbade his 
marriage within. He and his suite strolled about the 
cloisters while she went in to mass. In this hall of the 
Caryatides his body, in customary effigy, lay in state 
after the assassination. There is no change in these 
walls since that day, except that a vaulted ceiling took 
the place, in 1806, of the original oaken beams, which 
had served for rare hangings, not of tapestries, but of 
men. The long corridors and square rooms above. 



376 THE STONES OF PARIS 

peopled peaceably by pictures now, echoed to the rush- 
ing of frightened feet on the night of Saint Bartholo- 
mew, when Margot saved the life of her husband that 
was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden within 
the massive walls of Philippe-Auguste's building is a 
spiral stairway of his time, connecting the Salle des 
Sept Cheminees with the floor below, and beneath that 
with the cumbrous underground portions of his Old 
Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around 
the sharp turns deep below the surface, visions appear 
of Valois conspiracy and of the intrigues of the Flor- 
entine Queen-Mother. 

Here the wily creature had triumphed at last after 
waiting through weary years of humiliated wifehood ; 
passed, such of them as Henri H. was willing to waste 
in Paris far from his beloved Touraine, in the old 
Palais des Tournelles. We shall visit, in another chap- 
ter, that residence of the early kings of France, when 
they had become kings of France in more than name. 

After the accidental killing of Henry at the hand 
of Montmorency in the lists of this palace, his widow 
urged its immediate destruction, and this was accom- 
plished within, a few years. One portion of the site 
became a favorite duelling-ground, and it was here — 
exactly in the southeastern corner of Place des Vosges, 
where now nursemaids play with their charges and 
romping schoolboys raise the dust — that was fought, 
on Sunday, April 2y, 1578, the duel, as famous in 
history as in the pages of Dumas, between the three 
followers of the Due de Guise and the three mignons 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 377 

of Henri III. Those of the six who were not left dead 
on the ground were borne away desperately wounded. 
The instigator of the duel, Quelus — '' iin des grands 
mignons du roy " — lay for over a month, slowly dying 
of his nineteen wounds, in the Hotel de Boissy; hard 
by in Rue Saint-Antoine, which the King had had 
closed to traffic with chains. By his bedside Henri 
spent many hours every day, offering, with sobs, 100,- 
000 francs to the surgeon who should save him. 

Not far from this house of death, in Rue Saint- 
Antoine too, was a little house, very much alive, for 
it belonged to Marguerite — Navarre only in name — 
to which none may follow her save the favored one 
to whom her latest caprice has given a nocturnal meet- 
ing. She is carried there, under cover of her closed 
litter, whenever her mother, never her husband, shows 
undue solicitude concerning her erratic career. 

In the same street, on the corner of Rue Sainte- 
Catherine, now Sevigne — where stand new stone and 
brick structures — was the town house of the Comte 
de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantome, Bussy 
d'Amboise, done with Margot, was lured by a note 
written by the countess, under her husband's orders 
and eyes, giving her lover, Bussy, his usual rendez- 
vous during the count's absence. This time the count 
was at home, with a gang of his armed men ; and on 
this corner, on the night of August 19, 1579, the gal- 
lant was duly and thoroughly done to death, not quite 
so dramatically as Dumas narrates it in one of his 
magnificent fights. 



37^ THE STONES OF PARIS 

This Rue Saint-Antoine was, in those days, hardly 
less of a bustling thoroughfare than in our days, al- 
beit it was then a country road, unpaved, unlighted, 
bordered by great gardens with great mansions with- 
in them, or small dwellings between them. Outside 
Porte Saint-Antoine — that gate in the town wall along- 
side the Bastille where now is the end of Rue de la 
Bastille — on the road to Vincennes, was La Roquette, 
a maison-de-plaisance of the Valois kings. Hence the 
title of the modern prisons, on the same site. It was 
a favorite resort of the wretched third Henry, that 
shameless compound of sensuality and superstition; 
and it was on his way there, at the end of Rue de la 
Roquette, that the vicious little lame Duchesse de 
Montpensier had plotted to waylay him, and to cut his 
hair down to a tonsure with the gold scissors she car- 
ried so long at her girdle for that very use. He had 
had two crowns, she said — of Poland and of France 
— and she meant to give him a third, and make a monk 
of him, for the sake of her scheming brother, the Due 
de Guise. The plot was betrayed, just as Dumas de- 
tails, by one Nicolas Poulain, a lieutenant of the Prevot 
of the lie de France, in the service of the League. 

Gorenflot's priory — a vast Jacobin priory — was on 
the same road, just beyond the Bastille. To visit him 
out here came Chicot, almost as vivid a creation in our 
affections as d'Artagnan. Once, when the fat and 
esurient monk was fasting, Chicot tormented him with 
a description of their dinner awhile ago, near Porte 
Montmartre, when they had teal from the marshes of 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 379 

the Grange Bateliere — where runs now the street of 
that name — washed down with the best of Burgundy, la 
Romanee. These two dined most frequently and most 
amply, at ''La Come d'Ahondance " — a cabaret on the 
east side of Rue Saint- Jacques, opposite the cloisters 
and the gardens of Saint-Benoit, where the boy Fran- 
cois Villon had lived more than a century before. 
Either of the two shabby, aged hotels, still left at one 
corner of the old street may serve for Chicot's pet 
eating-place. His dwelling was in Rue des Augustins, 
now Rue des Grands-Augustins. Where that street 
meets the quay of the same name, is a restaurant dear 
to legal and medical and lay gourmets, where those two 
noble diners would be enchanted to dine to-day. Near 
Chicot's later dwelling in Rue de Bussy — now spelt 
" Buci "—was the inn, " The Sword of the Brave Che- 
valier," which served as the meeting-place of the Forty- 
five Guardsmen, on their arrival in Paris. You may 
find, in that same street, the lineal descendant of that 
inn, dirty and disreputable and modernized as to name, 
but still haunted for us by those forty-five gallant Gas- 
con gentlemen. 

The striking change of atmosphere, from the Valois 
court to the regency of Marie de' Medici and the reign 
of the two great cardinals, is shown clearly in the pages 
of Dumas, with his perhaps unconscious subtlety of in- 
tuition. We greet with delight the entrance into Paris 
of a certain raw Gascon youth mounted on his ludi- 
crously colored steed, and we are eager to follow him to 
the hotel of the Due de Treville in Rue du Vieux-Co- 



380 THE STONES OF PARIS 

lombier. This street stretches now, as then, between 
Place de Saint-Sulpice and Place de la Croix-Rouge, 
but it has been widened and wholly rebuilt, and the 
■courtyard that bustled with armed men, and every 
stone of de Treville's head-quarters, have vanished. 

The hotel of his temporary enemy. Due de La Tre- 
mouille, always full of Huguenots, the King complained, 
was in Rue Saint-Dominique, at No. 63, in that east- 
ern end cut away by Boulevard Saint-Germain. This 
had been the Tremouille mansion for only about a cen- 
tury, since the original family home had been given over 
to Chancellor Dubourg. Built by the founder of the 
family, Gui de La Tremoille — as it was then spelt — the 
great fighter who died in 1398, that superb specimen 
of fourteenth-century architecture, with additions late 
in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth centuries, 
stood at the corner of Rues des Bourdonnais and de 
Bethisy — two of the oldest streets on the north bank — 
until the piercing of Rue de Rivoli in 1844 compelled its 
destruction. Fragments of its fine Gothic carvings are 
set in the wall of the court of No. 31 Rue des Bourdon- 
nais, a building which occupies a portion of the original 
site. On the front of this house is an admirable iron 
balcony of later date. And just above, at No. 39 of 
this street, over the entrance gate of the remaining wing 
of another medieval mansion, is a superbly carved stone 
mask of an old man with a once gilded beard. 

It was the new Hotel La Tremouille, on the south 
side of the river, not far from the Luxembourg Gar- 
dens, that was nearly wrecked by de Treville's guards^ 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 381 



men, running to the rescue of d'Artagnan on that 
morning of his duel with Bernajoux, and of his danger 
from the onslaught of de La Tremouille's retainers. 

That duel ought to be good enough for us, but we 
have a hankering for the most dramatic and delightful 
of all duels in fiction. To get to its ground, we may 
follow either of the four friends, each coming his own 
way, each through streets changed but slightly even 
yet, all four coming out together at the corner of Rues 
de Vaugirard and Cassette; where stands an ancient 
wall, its moss-covered coping overshadowed by strag- 
gling trees, through whose branches shows the roof of 
a chapel. It is the chapel, and about it are the grounds, 
of the Carmes Dechausses. A pair of these gentry, sent 
by Pope Paul V., had appeared in Paris in the year of 
the assassination of Henri IV., and drew the devout 
to the little chapel they built here in the fields. The 
order grew rapidly in numbers and in wealth, acquir- 
ing a vast extent of ground ; roughly outlined now by 
Rues de Vaugirard, du Regard, du Cherche-Midi and 
Cassette. The corner-stone of the new chapel, that 
which we see, was laid by the Regent Marie de' Medici 
on July 26, 16 1 3. Beyond its entrance, along the street, 
rise modern buildings ; but behind the entrance in the 
western end of the wall, near Rue d'Assas, stands one 
of the original structures of the Barefooted Carmelites. 
This was used for a prison during the Revolution, and 
no spot in all Paris shows so graphic a scene of the 
September Massacres. Nothing of the prison has been 
taken away or altered. Here are the iron bars put then 



382 THE STONES OF PARIS 

in the windows of the ground floor on the garden side. 
At the top of that stone staircase the butchers crowded 
about that door ; out through it came their victims, to 
be hurled down these same steps, chnging to this same 
raihng; along these garden walks some of them ran, 
and were beaten down at the foot of yonder dark wall. 
This garden has not been changed since then, except 
that a large portion was shorn away by the cutting 
of Rues d'Assas and de Rennes and the Boulevard 
Raspail. 

The narrow and untravelled lane, now become Rue 
Cassette, and the unfrequented thoroughfare, now Rue 
de Vaugirard, between the monastery and the Luxem- 
bourg Gardens — which then reached thus far — met at 
just such a secluded spot as was sought by duellists; 
and this wall, intact in its antique ruggedness, saw — 
so far as anybody or anything saw — the brilliant fight 
between five of Richelieu's henchmen, led by the keen 
swordsman Jussac, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, 
aided by the volunteered sword of d'Artagnan; the 
sword he had meant to match against each one of the 
three, at whose side he found himself fighting in the 
end. And so, cemented by much young blood, was 
framed that goodly fellowship, of such constancy and 
vitality as to control kings and outwit cardinals and 
confound all France, as the lover of Dumas must needs 
believe ! 

Not only the duelling ground, but many of the scenes 
of " The Three Musketeers " are to be looked for in 
this quarter, near to de Treville's dwelling; where, 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 



Z^^ 




The Wall of the Carmelites. 



too, the four friends, inseparable by day, were not far 
apart at night, for they Hved " just around the corner," 
one from the other. 

Athos had his rooms, " within two steps of the Lux- 
embourg," in Rue Ferou, still having that name, still 



384 THE STONES OF PARIS 

much as he saw it. Those few, whom the taciturn Gri- 
maud allowed to enter, found tasteful furnishing, with 
a few relics of past splendor ; notably, a daintily dama- 
scened sword of the time of Francois L, its jewelled 
hilt alone worth a fortune. The vainglorious Porthos 
would have given ten years of his life for that sword, 
but it was never sold nor pledged by Athos. 

Porthos, himself, lived in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, 
he used to say ; and he gave grandiloquent descriptions 
of the superb furniture and rich decorations of his 
apartment. Whenever he passed with a friend through 
this street, he would raise his head and point out the 
house — before which his valet, Mousqueton, was al- 
ways seen strutting in full fig — and proudly announce, 
" That is my abode." But he never invited that friend 
to enter, and he was never to be found at home. So that 
one is led to suspect that his grand apartment is akin 
to his gorgeous corselet, having only a showy front and 
nothing behind ! We know that his " fine lady," his 
" duchess," his '* princess " — she was promoted with his 
swelling mood — was simply a Madame Coquenard, 
wife of a mean lawyer, living in Rue aux Ours. That 
dingy street, named from a corruption of the ancient 
*' Rue ou I' on cuit des oies/' between Rues Saint-Denis 
and Saint-Martin, has been partly cut away by Rue 
Etienne-Marcel ; but its tall, hide-bound, tight-fisted 
houses, that are left, make vivid to us those scrimped 
Sunday dinners, at which Porthos was famished even 
more than the already starved apprentices ; and bring 
home to us his artful working on the lady's credulous 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 3S5 

infatuation, that he might get his outfit from her hus- 
band's strongbox. 

The wily Aramis let his real duchess pass, with his 
friends, for the niece of his doctor, or for a waiting- 
maid. She was, indeed, a grande dame, beautiful and 
bold, devoted to political and personal intrigue, the 
finest flower of the court of that day. Marie de Ro- 
han, Duchesse de Chevreuse, known as '" la Frondeuse 
Duchesse/' was the trusted friend of Anne of Austria, 
and the active adversary of Richelieu and of Mazarin, 
and exiled from Paris by each in turn. She plays as 
busy a role in history as in Dumas. The daughter of 
Hercule de Rohan, Due de Montbazon, and the wife 
of Charles d'Albert, Due de Luynes, and, after his 
death, of Claude de Lorraine, Due de Chevreuse, this 
zealous recruit of the Fronde naturally had her " fling " 
in private as well as in public life. Her Hotel de 
Chevreuse et de Luynes was one of the grandest man- 
sions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as it originally 
stood at No. 31 Rue Saint-Dominique. The cutting of 
Boulevard Saint-Germain, leaving it No. 201 of that 
boulevard, has shorn off its two wings and its great 
front court. The main body, which remains, is impres- 
sive in the simple, stately dignity stamped on it by Man- 
sart, who gave to it his own roof. Its first-floor salons 
and chambers, lofty and spacious, glow with the ornate 
mouldings and decorations of that period, mellowed by 
the sombre splendors of its tapestries. Much of the 
garden — once a rural park within city limits — has been 
cut away by Boulevard Raspail, but from that street 



386 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



one sees, over the new boundary wall, wide-spreading 
trees that strike a welcome note of green amid sur- 
rounding stone. The latest Bottin, with no room for 
romance within its covers, gives the Comtesse de Chev- 
reuse as tenant of the house, along with other tenants, 
to whom she lets her upper floors. 

Aramis was not a guest at that mansion, his role 
being that of her host at his own apartment ; daintily 
furnished and adorned, in harmony with his taste and 
that of his frequent visitor. His comrades in the troop 
had infrequent privilege of admission. His apartment, 
on the ground floor, easy of entrance, was in Rue de 
Vaugirard, just east of Rue Cassette, and his windows 
looked out on the Luxembourg Gardens opposite. 
There were three small rooms, communicating, and the 
bedroom behind gave on a tiny garden, all his own, 
green and shady and well shut in from prying eyes. 
The whole place forms a most fitting entourage for the 
youthful priest who, after this episode of arms and 
of intrigue, was to rise so high in the Church, and who 
has always been, to all readers, the least congenial of 
the four musketeers. 

To the most sympathetic of them, d'Artagnan, dearer 
to us than all the others, we are eager to turn. The 
real d'Artagnan of history, who succeeded de Treville 
in command of the Guards, has left his memoirs, 
possibly written by another hand under his guidance. 
They are commonplace and coarse, broad as well as 
long, and leave us with no distinct portrait of the man. 
Our d'Artagnan, bodied forth from that ineffective 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 387 

sketch by the large brush that never niggled, might 
serve as an under-stiidy for Henri IV. ; equally brave 
and resourceful, equally buoyant in peril and ready in 
disaster ; with the same guileless and ingenuous candor 
that covered and carried off the craftiness beneath. 
The Gascon, no less than the Bearnais, was master of 
the jaunty artlessness of an astute and artful dodgery, 
a faiisse-honhomie that is yet delicious and endears 
them both to us. 

Stroll down Rue Servandoni, in its short length from 
Rue de Vaugirard to Rue Palatine against Saint-Sul- 
pice Church — the architect of whose western towers, 
Servandoni, gave his name to this street — and you will 
not fail to find, among the old houses still left, one 
which might have, sheltered d'Artagnan during his 
early days in de Treville's troop. This street was then 
known as Rue des Fossoyeurs, and, still as narrow 
though not quite so dirty as in d'Artagnan's day, has 
been mostly rebuilt. His apartment — " a sort of gar- 
ret," made up of one bedroom and a tiny room in which 
Planchet slept — was at the top of a house, given as No. 
12 and No. 14 in different chapters, owned by the objec- 
tionable and intrusive husband of the beloved Con- 
stance. For her sake, d'Artagnan remains in these 
poor rooms, and there his three friends say good-by to 
Paris and to him, now lieutenant of the famous troop. 

" Twenty Years After " we find our friend, but 
slightly sobered by those years, in search of a good lodg- 
ing and of a good table. He fell on both at the inn, 
'" La Chevrette," kept by the pretty Flemish Madeleine, 



S8S THE STONES OF PARIS 



in Rue Tiquetonne. Once a path on the outer side of 
the ditch, north of the town-wall, named for Rogier 
Tiquetonne, or Quinquetonne, a rich baker of the four- 
teenth century, that narrow curved street is, still, as 
to most of its length, a village highway in the centre 
of Paris. Its tall-fronted houses rise on either hand 
almost as he saw them. Among them is the Hotel de 
Picardie, and it is out of reason to doubt that d'Ar- 
tagnan, in memory of Planchet — for Planchet came 
from Picardy — was attracted by the name and made 
search therein for suitable rooms. Or, it may please 
our fancy to believe that this inn bore then the sign 
of The Kid, and that the kindly hostess changed its 
name, later, in memory of Planchet, grown prosperous 
and rich. 

D'Artagnan, mounting still higher in rank and in- 
come while here, went down lower in the inn ; and one 
fine morning said to his landlady : " Madeleine, give 
me your apartment on the first floor. Now that I am 
captain of the Royal Musketeers, I must make an ap- 
pearance ; nevertheless, still keep my room on the fifth 
story for me, one never knows what may happen ! " 

Good Master Planchet, sometime valet, and lifelong 
friend of the great d'Artagnan, turned grocer, and lived 
over his shop at the sign of " Le Pilon d'Or/' in Rue 
des Lombards. This had been a street of bankers and 
money-dealers in the outset, and it was named, to alter 
De Quincey's ornate reference to another Lombard 
Street, after the Lombards or Milanese, who affiliated 
an infant commerce to the matron splendors of the 




Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hotel de Picardie. 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 389 



Adriatic and the Mediterranean. When the financial 
centre went westward, this street was invaded by the 
grocers and spice-dealers, who hold it to this day. Its 
narrow length is still fragrant with the descendants 
of the spices in which Planchet traded, and of the 
raisins into which d'Artagnan plunged his hands so 
greedily. 

To those of us who go through the short and stupid 
Rue de la Harpe of our Paris, it is puzzling to read 
of its re-echoing with the ceaseless clatter of troopers 
riding through. But in those old days, and up to a com- 
paratively recent date, it was one of the important 
arteries of circulation between the southern side of the 
town and the Island ; the most frequented road between 
the Louvre and the Luxembourg, when they were both 
royal residences. It started from the little open place, 
now enlarged and boasting its fountain, where Rue 
Monsieur-le-Prince comes out opposite the Luxem- 
bourg Gardens, and curved down to the river-bank, 
and to the first Pont Saint-Michel. It was the only 
long, unbroken thoroughfare to the west of Rue Saint- 
Jacques, that street leading to Petit-Pont, and so across 
the Island to Notre-Dame Bridge. So Rue de la 
Harpe was a crowded highway, bordered by busy 
shops. Its western side was done wholly away with 
by the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Michel, and that 
broad boulevard has usurped the site of most of the 
old street; its eastern side saved only in that section 
along the Cluny garden. 

D'Artagnan, while living on the left bank in his 



390 THE STONES OF PARIS 

early days, made his way by this street to visit his flame 
Lady de Winter. That dangerous adventuress is domi- 
ciled by Dumas at No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des 
Vosges, the number of the house still the same. It 
is a historic house, and its story is told in our Hugo 
pages. Dumas was one of the frequenters of Hugo's 
apartment there, and made use of it and its approaches 
in " The Three Musketeers." 

When Athos came to town, in later years, it was his 
custom to put up at the auherge, " Au Grand Roi 
Charlemagne," in Rue Guenegaud ; a street bearing 
still its old name, but the inn has gone. So, too, has 
gone the sign of The Fox, in Rue du Vieux-Colom- 
bier, where he found quarters for himself and his son 
Bragelonne, twenty years after. He brought the youth 
here, to the scenes of his own youth, hoping to launch 
him in a like career of arms. 

From there, the two went, one night, across the river 
to a house in the Marais, known to all the footmen and 
sedan-chairmen of Paris, says Dumas ; a house not of 
a great lord or of a great lady, and where was neither 
dancing, dining, nor card-playing ; yet it was the favor- 
ite resort of the men best worth knowing in Paris. 
It was the abode of " le petit Scarron." About his 
chair, wherein he was held helpless by his paralysis, 
met especially the enemies of Mazarin, the witty and 
lewd rhymesters of the Fronde — not one of them as 
witty or as lewd as was the crippled host. Yet some 
soupgon of decency had been brought into his house 
by his young wife; the poor country girl of sixteen, 



THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS 39 1 

Frangoise d'Aubigne, who accepted the puny paralytic 
of forty and more, rather than go into a convent. After 
his death she became Madame de Maintenon, and later 
Queen of France, by her secret marriage with Louis 
XIV., as old and almost as decrepit as was her first 
husband. 

Dumas has brought Scarron to this house a few years 
later than history warrants, and he places the house in 
Rue des Tournelles, while it was really a short step from 
there, being at the corner of Rues des Douze-Portes 
and de Saint-Louis, now Rue Turenne. We shall visit 
it in our final stroll. 

With the going of time came the loosening of the ties 
that held the great quartette together ; yet, each pass- 
ing on his own way, all were ready to reunite, at any 
moment, for a new deed of emprise and for the joy of 
countless readers. We spare ourselves the pain of see- 
ing them at that cruel moment when they found them- 
selves on opposing sides, blade crossing blade. We 
take leave of Aramis, the Bishop, deep in the intrigues 
dear to his plotting spirit ; of Porthos, complacent in 
his wealth, growing more corpulent at his well-spread 
table; of Athos, sedate and dignified, content in the 
tranquil life of his beloved chateau, at Blois. 

And d'Artagnan ? Most fitting in his eyes, mayhap, 
would it be to take our last look at him in the height of 
his glory, host of the Hotel de Treville, receiving the 
King at his own table. We prefer, rather, to hold him 
in memory just when Athos introduces his old comrade 
to the assemblage at Blois, as " Monsieur le Chevalier 



392 • THE STONES OF PARIS' 

d'Artagnan, Lieutenant of his- Majesty's Musketeers, a 
devoted friend and one of the most excellent and brave 
gentlemen I have ever known." 

The reading world echoes his words. In the whole 
range of fiction there exists no gentleman more excel- 
lent and more brave ! 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 

When Madame Hugo brought her two younger 
boys, Eugene and Victor, to Paris in 1808, she took a 
temporary lodging in Rue de Clichy, until she found an 
apartment with a garden, on the southern side of the 
Seine. In this part of the town, where gardens, such 
as she needed, are plentiful even yet, she sought all her 
future abodes. Her first home in this quarter was near 
the old Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Vic- 
tor, then six years old, could never recall its exact site, 
after he grew up, and could not say if the house were 
still standing. This ground-floor apartment proved to 
be too small for the small family ; which was soon in- 
stalled, a few steps farther south, in a roomy old house 
within its own garden. It was a portion of the ancient 
Convent of the Feuillantines, left untouched by the 
Revolution, at Impasse des Feuillantines, No. 12 — an 
isolated mansion in a deserted corner of southern Paris. 
The great garden running wild, its fine old trees, and its 
ruined chapel, claimed the first place in the recollec- 
tions of Victor's boyhood ; " a religious and beloved 
souvenir," he fondly regarded it. 

This homely paradise has disappeared ; partly in- 
vaded by the aggressive builder, and partly cut away to 

395 



396 THE STONES OF PARIS 

make room for Rue d'Ulm, called by Hugo a '' big and 
useless street." The greater portion of the site of his 
house and garden is now covered by the huge buildings 
of one of the city schools. By a curious coincidence, 
at No. 12 Rue des Feuillantines — which must not be 
confused, as it is often confused, with the Impasse of 
the same name — there stands just such an old house, 
in the midst of just such gardens, shaded by just such 
old trees, as Hugo describes in the pathetic reminis- 
cences of his youth, and as those of us remember, who 
saw his old home, only a few years ago. 

His childish memories went back, also, to his days at 
school in Rue Saint-Jacques, not far from home; and 
to a night lit up by the illumination of all Paris, in 
celebration of the birth of the little King of Rome, in 
1811. This was just before the sudden journey of the 
three to Madrid to join General Hugo. The delinea- 
tion of the boy Marius, swaying between his clashing 
relatives, is a vivid drawing of the attitude, during these 
and later years, of the young Victor, leaning at times 
toward his Bourbonist mother, at times toward his 
Bonapartist father. Of that gallant soldier, whose hunt 
for " Fra Diavolo " — the nickname of a real outlaw — 
seems to belong rather to the realm of fiction than of 
fact, one hears but little in his son's early history. Ex- 
cept to send for them from Madrid, and except for his 
brief appearance in Paris, during the Hundred Days, 
General Hugo seldom saw and scarcely influenced these 
two younger sons during their boyhood. 

Once more in Paris, and for awhile at the Feuil- 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 397 

lantines, we find the devoted mother setthng herself 
and her sons, on the last day of the year 1813, in a 
roomy old building of the time of Louis XV., in Rue 
du Cherche-Midi. Her rooms were on the ground floor, 
as usual, with easy access to the health-giving garden, 
and the boys slept above. There was a court in front, 
in which, during the occupation of Paris by the Ahies, 
were quartered a Prussian officer and forty of his men ; 
to the disgust of the mother, and to the joy of her boys, 
captivated by soldierly gewgaws. The site of court and 
house and garden is covered by a grim military prison, 
in which history has been made in the closing years of 
the nineteenth century. 

On the other side of the street, at the corner of Rue 
du Regard, was and is the Hotel de Toulouse, a seven- 
teenth-century structure, named for its former occu- 
pant, the Comte de Toulouse, son of Madame de Mon- 
tespan. It was used as a prison early in the nineteenth 
century, and since then it has been the seat of the Con- 
seil-de-Guerre ; famous, or infamous, in our day, as the 
head-quarters of the Court-Martial. The wide facade 
on the court has no distinction, nor has the " Tribunal 
of Military Justice " on the first floor ; to which we 
mount by the broad staircase at the left of the entrance- 
door. Above are the living-rooms of the commandant, 
who was a Monsieur Foucher at that time, with whose 
family, the Hugo family, already acquainted, formed 
now a lasting friendship. It was this intimacy that 
made their home here the brightest spot in Hugo's boy- 
ish horizon. 



398 



THE STONES OE PARIS 



When Napoleon's return from Elba brought his old 
officers back to their allegiance, General Hugo hurried 
to Paris, and, before hurrying away again, placed his 
boys in a boarding-school — the Abbaye Cordier, in Rue 
Sainte-Marguerite. This was a gloomy little street, 




The Hotel de Toulouse. 



dingy with the smoke of the smiths' forges that filled 
it, elbowed in among equally narrow ways between the 
prison of the Abbaye — then standing where now runs 
the roadway of modern Boulevard Saint-Germain — 
and the Cour du Dragon. This superb relic of ancient 
Paris has been left untouched, and the carved dragon 
above its great arched entrance looks down, out of the 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 399 



past, on modern Rue de Rennes. Rue Sainte-Margue- 
rite has been less lucky, for such small section of it, 
as remained after the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Ger- 
main and Rue de Rennes, is mainly rebuilt, and re- 
named Rue Gozlin. 

A little later, Victor was advanced to the Lycee 
Louis-le-Grand, the college of many another French- 
man who became famous in after life, notably of Mo- 
liere. These two youths saw the same buildings of the 
Lycee and studied in the same rooms ; for it was de- 
molished and rebuilt only under the Second Empire. 
It stood — and the new structure stands — in Rue Saint- 
Jacques, behind the College de France. It was some- 
thing of a stretch for youthful legs by the roundabout 
way between college and home, but he plodded sturdily 
along, that solemn lad, taking himself and all he did 
as seriously then as when he became a Peer of France, 
and the self-elected Leader of a Cause. 

In 1818 Madame Hugo and her boys came to a new 
home on the third floor of No. 18 Rue des Petits-Au- 
gustins, in a wing of that old abbaye of the Augustin 
fathers, which had given its name to the street, now 
Rue Bonaparte. The entrance court, on that street, of 
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, covers the site of this wing, 
and the school has replaced the rest of the monastery, 
saving, within its modern walls, only the chapel built 
by Queen Marguerite. In the old court and the old 
buildings behind, at that time, were stored tombs of 
French kings and historic monuments and historic 
bones,, removed from their original grounds, as has been 



400 THE STONES OF PARIS 

told in our Moliere chapter, to save them from mutila- 
tion at the hands of the Revolutionary Patriots. On this 
queer assemblage the boys' room looked down; their 
mother, from her front windows, looked down on the 
remains of the vast gardens of the Hotel de La Roche- 
foucauld, once a portion of the grounds of Marguerite, 
that stretched to the north of Rue Visconti, between 
Rues de Seine and Bonaparte. The view, so far below, 
could not compensate Madame Hugo for the loss of her 
own garden, which meant sun and air and health. She 
drooped and fell ill, and her only solace was the devo- 
tion of her son Victor. Whenever she was able to go 
out, they spent their evenings with the Foucher family, 
at the Hotel de Toulouse. While the boys sat silent, 
listening to the talk of their elders, Victor's eyes were 
busy, and they taught him that Adele Foucher was good 
to look upon. These two children walked, open-eyed, 
into love, as simply and as naturally as did Cosette and 
Marius ; and after a brief period of storm and stress, 
their marriage came in due time, and they began their 
long and happy life together. 

This Hugo home in Rue des Petits-Augustins, rising 
right in front of all who came along Rue des Beaux- 
Arts, was a familiar sight to a young Englishman, about 
ten years after this time. His name was William Make- 
peace Thackeray, and he was lodging in this latter 
street among other students of the Latin Quarter, and 
trying to make a passable artist with the material given 
him by nature for the making of an unsurpassable au- 
thor. His way lay in front of the old ahhaye, each time 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 401 

he went to or from the schools, or his modest restaurant. 
Thirion was the host of this cheap feeding-place, es- 
teemed by art students, on the northern side of old 
Rue des Boucheries; of which this side and some of 
its buildings have been saved, while the street itself has 
been carried away in the wider stream of Boulevard 
Saint-Germain. There, at No. 160, to-day, you will 
find the same restaurant, under the same name on the 
sign, and the same rooms, swarming with students as 
during Thackeray's days in Paris. 

In 1 82 1, at the end of her term of three years in the 
abbaye, Madame Hugo took her sons and her furniture 
directly up Rue Bonaparte and turned into Rue des 
Mezieres, and in its No. 10 they were soon settled in a 
ground floor with its garden. The great new building 
at No. 8 stands on the site of house and court and gar- 
den. There is left, of their day there, only the two- 
storied cottage on the western end of No. 6 Rue des 
Mezieres — then No. 8 — which preserves the image of 
the Hugo cottage, and brings back the aspect of the 
street as they saw it, countrified with just such cottages. 

Early in their residence here, Victor was honored 
by a summons to visit Chateaubriand, long the literary 
idol of the schoolboy, who had written in his diary, 
when only fourteen : '' I will be Chateaubriand or noth- 
ing ! " For he had begun to rhyme already at the Cor- 
dier school, and in his seventeenth year he had estab- 
lished, in collaboration with his eldest brother, Abel, 
" Le Conservateur Litteraire," a bi-monthly of poetry, 
criticism, politics, most of it written by Victor. It lived 



402 THE STONES OF PARIS 

from December, 1819, to March, 1821, and its scarce 
copies are prized by collectors. Now the precocious 
boy's ode " On the death of the Duke of Berry " — ■ 
assassinated by Louvel in February, 1820, in Rue 
Rameau, on the southern side of Square Louvois, then 
the site of the opera-house — had fallen under the eye of 
Chateaubriand, who was reported to have dubbed him 
" The Sublime Child." Chateaubriand denied this ut- 
terance, in later years, but agreed to let it stand, since 
the phrase had become '' consecrated." ' It was at the 
door of No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, then the resi- 
dence of the elder author, that the young poet knocked 
in those early days of his fame ; and here, a little later, 
he was invited by the diplomat to join his Embassy to 
Berlin. Madame Hugo's health prevented the accept- 
ance of this flattering offer. 

While still at this home in Rue des Mezieres, Victor 
received another honor in a call from Lamartine, the 
lately and loudly acclaimed author of '' Les Medita- 
tions," who was then about thirty-one years of age. In 
a letter, written many years after, Lamartine described 
this first meeting : '' Youth is the time for forming 
friendships. I love Hugo because I knew and loved 
him at a period of life when the heart is still expanding 
within the breast. ... I found myself on the ground 
floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There 
a grave, melancholy mother was industriously instruct- 
ing some boys of various ages — her sons. She showed 
me into a low room a little apart, at the farther end of 
which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 403 

with a fine massive head, inteUigent and thoughtful. 
This was Victor Hugo, the man whose pen can now 
charm or terrify the world." 

The grave, melancholy mother died in the early sum- 
mer of 182 1, and her bereaved sons carried her body 
across the Place, to the Church, of Saint-Sulpice and 
then to the Cemetery of Mont-Parnasse. On the even- 
ing of that day of the burial, Victor returned to the 
cemetery, and there, overcome with grief and choked by 
sobs, the boy of only nineteen wandered alone for hours, 
recalling his mother's image and repeating her name. 
Seeking blindly for some comforting presence, he found 
his way, that same night, to the Hotel de Toulouse, for 
a glimpse of Adele Foucher. Unseen himself, he saw 
her dancing, all unconscious of his mother's death and 
his heart-breaking loss. 

After weeks of wretched loneliness, young Hugo 
went to live, with a country cousin just come to town, 
on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du Dragon. This street 
is connected with the court of the same name by a nar- 
row passage under the houses at the western end of 
the court. No. 30 is still standing, a high, shabby old 
building, that yet suggests its better days. In the bel- 
vedere high above the attic windows, Hugo lived the 
life of his Marius, keeping body and soul together on 
a slender income of 700 francs a year. Luckier than 
Marius, who could only follow Cosette and the old con- 
vict in the Luxembourg Gardens, Hugo was allowed 
little walks there with his adored lady, her mother al- 
ways accompanying them. This chaperonage did not 



404 THE STONES OF PARIS 

prevent the secret slipping of letters between the lov- 
ers' hands, and many of these have been preserved for 
future publication. 

It was at this time that the Post-office officials held 
up, in their cahinet-noir, a letter from Hugo, offering 
the shelter of his one room, "" au cinquienie," to a young 
fellow implicated in the conspiracy of Saumur, and 
hiding from the royal police. Hugo makes this offer, 
his letter explains, in pure sympathy for a misguided 
young man in peril of arrest and death ; his own al- 
legiance to the throne being so established as to permit 
him to give this aid with no danger to himself and no 
discredit to his loyalty. The letter was copied, resealed, 
sent on its way ; the copy was carried to Louis XVHL, 
and so moved him — not in the direction meant by his 
officials — that he made inquiry about its writer, and 
presently gave him a pension. This incident was not 
known to Hugo until many years after. 

Among the men who visited him in this garret was 
Alfred de Vigny, then a captain in the Royal Guard, 
and dreaming only, as yet, of his *' Cinq-Mars." Hugo 
was dreaming many dreams, too, over his work, and 
his brightest dream became a reality in October, 1822, 
when, in Saint-Sulpice's Chapel of the Virgin — the 
chapel from which his mother had been buried eigh- 
teen months earlier — was performed the Church part 
of his marriage with Adele Foucher. The wedding 
banquet was given at the Hotel de Toulouse by her 
father, who had been won over to this immediate 
marriage, despite the delay he had urged because 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 405 

of the youth of the bride and the poverty of the bride- 
groom. 

The young couple, whose combined ages barely 
reached thirty-five, found modest quarters for awhile 
in Rue du Cherche-Midi, near her and his former 
homes, and then removed to No. 90 Rue de Vaugirard. 
Their abode, cut away by the piercing of that end of 
Rue Saint-Placide, is replaced by the new building still 
numbered 90 Rue de Vaugirard, near the corner of 
Rue de I'Abbe-Gregoire. 

In this first real home of his married life, Hugo 
produced his " Hans dTslande " and his " Bug Jargal " 
— the latter rewritten from a crude early work — by 
which, poor things though they were, he earned money, 
as well as by his poems, poured forth in ungrudging 
flood. In the ranks of the Classicists at first, he soon 
fell into line with the Romanticists, and by 1827 he 
was the acknowledged leader of ''La Jeune France." 
On his marriage, he had been allotted the pension, 
already alluded to, of 1,500 francs yearly, by Louis 
XVIIL, in recognition of his Royalist rhymings, and 
this sum was doubled in 1823. 

With their growing fortune, the young couple al- 
lowed themselves more commodious quarters. These 
they found, early in 1828, in a house behind No. 11 
Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a street somewhat cur- 
tailed in its length by the cutting of Rue de Rennes, 
and the old No. 1 1 is now No. 2y. A long alley, once 
a rural lane between bordering trees, leads to the 
modest house hidden away from the street. Quiet 



4o6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

enough to-day, it was quieter then, when it was really 
in the Fields of Our Lady, in that quarter of the town 
endeared to Hugo by his several boyhood-homes. 

The long, low cottage, since divided and numbered 
2y and 29, still faces the street, just as when he first 
passed under its northern end into the lane, with his 
young wife. \ She writes, in her entrancing " Life of 
Victor Hugo, by a Witness " : " The avenue was con- 
tinued by a garden, whose laburnums touched the 
windows of his rooms. A lawn extended to a rustic 
bridge, the branches of which grew green in summer." 
The rustic bridge, the lawn, and the laburnums are no 
longer to be found, but the house is untouched, save 
by time and the elements. Behind those windows of 
the second floor, where was their apartment, was writ- 
ten " Marion Delorme," his strongest dramatic work, 
in the short time between the ist and the 24th of June, 
1829; and there he read it to invit-ed friends, among 
whom sat Balzac, just then finishing, in his own pains- 
taking way, " Les Chouans." In October of this year 
" Hernani " was written and put on the boards of the 
Comedie Fran(;aise, long before reluctant censors al- 
lowed " Marion Delorme " to be played. 

To these rooms came, of evenings, those brilliant 
young fellows and those who were bent on being 
brilliant, who made the vanguard of the Romanticists. 
Here was formed " le Cenacle," of which curious circle 
we shall soon see more. Here Sainte-Beuve dropped 
in, from his rooms a few doors off, at No. 19, now No. 
37, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs ; dropped in too fre- 



I 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 407 

quently, for the " smiling critic " came rather to smile 
on young Madame Hugo than for other companion- 
ship. Sometimes of an afternoon, such of the group 
as were walkers would start for a long stroll out to 
and over the low hills surrounding the southern sub- 
urbs, to see the sun set beyond the plains of Vanves 
and Montrouge. As they returned they would rest 
and quench their modest thirst in a suburban guin- 
guette and listen to the shrill fiddling of " la mere 
Sagnet." All this and much more is told in Hugo's 
verse. The town has grown around and beyond the 
tavern, where it stands on the southwestern corner of 
Rue de Vanves and Avenue du Maine, its two stories 
and steep roof and dormer windows all like an old 
village inn going to decay. 

One day, late in 1828, Hugo started from his house 
for the prison of the Grande-Force, to visit Beranger. 
The simple-seeming old singer, during his nine months' 
imprisonment, had an " at home " every day, receiv- 
ing crowds of men eminent in politics and in letters. 
His conviction made one of the most potent counts 
in the indictment of the Bourbons by the populace, 
two years later. 

It was in this way that Hugo had opportunity to 
study the prison, in such quick and accurate detail, as 
enabled him to make that dramatic description of the 
escape of Thenardier ; an escape made possible, at the 
last, by little Gavroche, fetched from his palatial lodg- 
ing in the belly of the huge plaster elephant on Place 
de la Bastille, on the very night of his giving shelter 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



to the two lost Thenardier boys, whom he — the heroic, 
pathetic, grotesque creature — didn't know to be his 
brothers any more than he knew he was going to 
rescue his father! 

This prison had been the Hotel du Roi-de-Sicile, 
away back in the " middling ages," and had been en- 
larged and renamed many times, until it came, about 
1700, to Caumont, Due de La Force, whose name clung 
to it until its demolition early in the Second Empire. 
Taken in 1754 by the Government, Necker made of it 
what was then considered a " model prison," to please 
the King, and to placate himself and the philosophers 
about him, righteously irate with the horrors of the 
Grand-Chatelet. The Terror packed its many build- 
ings, surrounding inner courts, with political prisoners, 
and killed most of them in the September Massacres. 
Its main entrance was on the northern side of Rue du 
Roi-de-Sicile, near Rue Malher, recently cut. Just at 
the southwestern junction of those two streets, stood 
— men yet living have seen it — the home (a large stone 
planted beside the roadway to keep wheels from con- 
tact with the bordering buildings)*, on which was 
hacked off the head of the Princesse de Lamballe, as 
she was led from that entrance to be " elargie," on the 
morning of September 3, 1792. 

The landlady of the Hugo household had retired 
from trade with enough money to buy this quiet place, 
set far back from this quiet street, intending to end 
her days in an ideal resting-place. From the first, her 
smug comfort had been violated by many queer visi- 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 409 

tors, and when '' Hernani " made its hit, there was a 
ceaseless procession of the author's noisy admirers, by 
night and by day, on her staircase and over her head 
■ — she had kept the ground floor for her tranquil re- 
treat — until the maddened woman gave Monsieur Hugo 
'' notice to quit." She liked her tenants, she hastened 
to say, she felt for the poor young wife in her loss of 
sleep, and, above all, she pitied her for having a hus- 
band " who had taken to such a dreadful trade ! " 

So they had to move, and late in 1830, or early in 
183 1, they went across the river to No. 9 Rue Jean- 
Goujon, where, in an isolated house surrounded by 
gardens, in the midst of the then deserted and deso- 
late Champs-Elysees, they could be as noisy as they 
and their friends chose. Soon after coming here they 
took their new daughter and their last child, Adele, to 
Saint-Philippe-du-Roule for her baptism, as Hugo re- 
called, twenty years later, at Balzac's burial service in 
the same church." But here, despite the fields that 
tempted to walks in all directions, Hugo shut himself 
in and shut out his friends. For he was bound, by 
contract with his publisher, to produce " Notre-Dame 
de Paris " within a few months. With his eye for 
effect, he put on a coarse, gray, woollen garment, 
reaching from neck to ankles, locked up his coats and 
hats, and went to work, stopping only to eat and sleep. 
He began his melodramatic book to the booming of 
the cannon of a Parisian insurrection, and he ended it 
in exactly five and one-half months, just as he had got 
to the last drop of ink in the bottle he had bought at 



4iq THE STONES OF PARIS 

the beginning. He thought of calHng this romance 
" What there is in a Bottle of Ink," but gave that title 
to Alphonse Karr, who used it later for a collection 
of stories. Goethe's verdict on " Notre-Dame de 
Paris " must stand ; it is a dull and tiresome show of 
marionettes. 

This house has gone, that street has been rebuilt, 
the whole quarter has a new face and an altered aspect. 
After his book was finished, Hugo hurried out to see 
the barricades of 1832, which he has glorified in " Les 
Miserables." At this time, too — by way of contrast 
— he permits a glimpse of his undisturbed home life. 
It is seen by a friend, who, " ushered into a large room, 
furnished with simple but elegant taste, was struck 
with the womanly beauty of Madame Hugo, who had 
one of her children on her knee." When he saw the 
poet, sitting reading by the fireside close by, '' he was 
vividly impressed with the resemblance of the entire 
scene to one of Van Dyck's finest pictures." 

During the rehearsals of " Le Roi s'Amuse," in Oc- 
tober, 1832, Hugo found time to settle himself and his 
family in the apartment on the second floor of No. 6 
Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. We shall prowl 
about this historic spot when we come to explore the 
Marais; just now, only this apartment and this house 
come under our scrutiny. It was one of the earliest 
and grandest mansions of this grand square, and took 
its title of Hotel de Guemenee when that family held 
possession in 1630. Ten years later one of its floors 
was tenanted by Marion Delorme, whose gorgeous 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO Art 

coach with four horses drew a crowd to that south- 
eastern corner whenever she aHghted, and whose dainty 
rooms drew a crowd of another sort on her evenings, 
so much the vogue. They were the gathering-place 
of the swells of her day, of dignitaries of the court 
and the Church, of men famous in letters and science, 
all attracted by the charm and wit and polish of this 
young woman. In his '' Cinq-Mars," de Vigny brings 
together in her salon, among many nameless fine 
people, Descartes, Grotius, Corneille — fresh from his 
latest success, " Cinna " — and a youth of eighteen, 
Poquelin, afterward Moliere. This is well enough, 
but he goes too far in his fancy for a telling picture, 
and drags in Milton, shy and silent. John Milton had 
long before passed through Paris, on his way home 
from Italy, and was then busy over controversial 
pamphlets in London. Nor can the English reader 
take seriously the recitation, urged on '' le jeune An- 
glais," of passages from his " Paradise Lost " — writ- 
ten twenty years later — a recitation quite compre- 
hended by this exclusively French audience. For the 
Delorme is moved to tears, and Georges Scudery to 
censure, so shocked are his religious scruples and his 
poetic taste ! De Vigny is surer of his stepping when 
on French ground, and plausibly makes Marion a spy 
on the conspirators, in the pay of Richelieu. At that 
time, during the construction of his Palais-Cardinal 
— now the Palais-Royal — his residence was diagonally 
opposite No. 6, in the northwestern corner of Place 
Royale. That corner has been cut through, and his 



412 THE STONES OF PARIS 

house cut away, by the prolongation of Rue des Vosges 
along that side of the square. It has been said that 
the cardinal's hunting to death of Cinq-Mars was less 
a punishment for the conspiracy against King and 
State than a personal vengeance on the dandy, with a 
hundred pairs of boots, who had supplanted him with 
Mile. Delorme. The Marais streets knew them both 
well. Cinq-Mars lived with his father in the family 
Hotel d'Effiat, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, demolished 
in 1882. Marion did not pine long after his execu- 
tion, but went her way gayly, until she was driven by 
her debts to a pretended death and a sham funeral, at 
which she peeped from these windows. She sank out 
of sight of men, and died in earnest, before she had 
come to forty years, in her mother's apartment in Rue 
de Thorigny, leaving a fortune in fine lace and not a 
sou in cash for her burial. 

De Vigny proves his intimate acquaintance with this 
house, during Hugo's residence, by his use of its back 
entrance for the confederates of Cinq-Mars, making 
their way to Delorme's house, on the night of their 
betrayal. And Dumas makes this entrance serve for 
d'Artagnan in his visits to Lady de Winter and to her 
attractive maid. 

That entrance is still in existence from Rue Saint- 
Antoine, by way of the Impasse — then Cul-de-sac — 
Guemenee, and at its end through a small gate into 
the court, and so by a back door into the house. 
Through that rear entrance crowded a squad of the 
National Guard, from Rue Saint-Antoine, during the 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 413 

street fighting of February, 1848, intending by this 
route to enter the square unseen, and secure it against 
the regular troops of Louis-PhiHppe. Some few 
among them amused themselves by mounting the stairs 
and invading Hugo's deserted apartment. He had 
gone, that day, at the head of a detachment of the 
royal force, not leading it against the rioters, but lend- 
ing his influence as Peer of France to save, from its 
bayonets, the fellow-rioters of the men just then in- 
truding on his home. They did no harm, happily, as 
they filed through the various rooms, and past a child's 
empty cradle by the side of the empty bed. It had 
been the cradle of the daughter, Adele, and perhaps 
of the other babies, and was always cherished by Ma- 
dame Hugo. In a small room in the rear, that serv^ed 
as Hugo's study, the leader of the band picked up 
some written sheets from the table, the ink hardly dry, 
and read them aloud. It was the manuscript of *' Les 
Miserables," just then begun, but not finished and pub- 
lished until 1862, when the exile was in Guernsey. 

While plodding along with that great work, Hugo 
put forth from this study much verse and his last plays. 
Here, in 1838, he wrote his final dramatic success, 
" Ruy Bias," and his final dramatic failure, " Les Bur- 
graves," which ended his stage career. From here 
he went to his fauteuil in the Academy in 1841, the step 
to the seat of Peer of France, accorded him by the 
King within a few years. Meanwhile, his larger rooms 
hardly held the swelling host of his friends, and, it 
must be said, his flatterers. Not Marion Delorme had 



414 THE STONES OF PARIS 

more, nor listened to them with a more open ear. 
Their poison became his food. Indeed, the men who 
formed "" le Cenacle," in these and other salons, seemed 
to find their breath only in an atmosphere of mutual 
admiration. Each called the other " Cher Maitre/' 
and all would listen, in wistful reverence, to every 
utterance of the others and tO' the deliverance of his 
latest bringing-forth, vouchsafed by each in turn. 
While Lamartine, standing before the fireplace, turned 
on the pensive tune of his latest little thing in verse, 
Hugo gazed intent on him as on an oracle. Then 
Hugo would pour forth his sonorous rhymes, his 
voice most impressive in its grave monotone. The 
smaller singers next took up the song. No vulgar ap- 
plause followed any recitation, but the elect, moved 
beyond speech, would clutch the reciter's hand, their 
eyes upturned to the cornice. Those not entirely 
voiceless with ecstasy might be heard to murmur the 
freshest phrases of sacramental adoration : " Cathe- 
drale," or '' Pyr amide d'Egypte!" 

There were certain minor chartered poseurs in the 
circle. There was Alfred de Vigny, " before his trans- 
figuration," to whom might be applied Camille Des- 
moulins's gibe at Saint-Just : " He carries his head as 
if it were a sacrament." To which Saint-Just replied 
by the promise, that he kept, to make Camille carry 
his head after the fashion of Saint-Denis. There was 
Alfred de Musset, who had been brought first to the 
cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs by Paul Fou- 
cher, his schoolmate and Hugo's brother-in-law. Like 




i£ '*' 



*^ 



( ! 






..f^y^' 



Alfred de Musset. 

(From the sketch by Louis-Eugene Lami.) 



[J^rom a carbon print by Braun, Clemettt £r» Co.] 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 41 5 

his Fantasio, de Musset then " had the May upon his 
cheeks," and was young and gay and given to laughter; 
now, old at thirty, he posed as the bored and hlase 
prey and poet of passion. 

Yet there were others, by way of contrast : Dumas, 
fresh from his romance-factory, full-blooded, stalwart, 
sane; Gautier, dropping in from his rooms near by, 
at No. 8 in the square, ship-shape inside his skull for all 
its mane of curling locks, and for all his eccentric cos- 
tume; Barye, coming from his simple old house at 
No. 4 Quai des Celestins, sitting isolated and silent, 
dreaming of the superb curves of his bronze creatures ; 
Nodier, escaping from his Librarian's desk in the Ar- 
senal, the flaneur of genius, with no convictions about 
anything, and with generous friendships for every- 
body ; Delacroix, impetuous chief of the insurgents in 
painting, most mild-mannered of men, his personal 
suavity disarming those who were going gunning for 
him, because of his insurrectionary brush; Merimee, 
frock-coated, high-collared, buttoned-up, self-con- 
tained, cold and correct, of formal English cut. 

Among the guests were occasional irreverent on- 
lookers, not deemed worthy of admission to the inner 
circle, who sat outside, getting much fun out of its 
antics. Such a one was Madame Ancelot, whose 
graphic pen is pointed with her jealousy as a rival 
lion-hunter, who had outlived her vogue of the early 
Restoration. Daudet's sketch of her blue-stockinged 
salon, a faded survival of its splendors under Louis 
XVIIL, is as daintily malicious as is her sketch of 



41 6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Hugo's evenings. Through those evenings, Madame 
Ancelot says, Madame Hugo redined on a couch, as 
if over-wearied by the load of glory she was helping 
to carry. That lady had one relief in this new home, 
its doors being shut against the ugly face of Sainte- 
Beuve, at the urging of the indignant young wife. 
This happened in 1834, and within a few years Sainte- 
Beuve gave to the world his " Book of Love," a book 
of hatred toward Hugo, with its base suggestion of 
the wife's complaisance for the writer. Him it hurt 
more than it hurt Hugo. He had taken, and he still 
keeps, his unassailable place in the affection, as in the 
admiration, of his countrymen. There can be no need 
to summon them as witnesses, yet it may be well to 
quote the words of two foreign fellow-craftsmen. 

The Englishman, Swinburne, in his wild and un- 
tamed enthusiasm, acclaims Hugo as a healer and a 
comforter, a redeemer and a prophet; burning with 
wrath and scorn unquenchable ; deriving his light and 
his heat from love, while terror and pity and eternal 
fate are his keynotes. No great poet, adds Swinburne, 
was ever so good, no good man was ever so great. 
Heine, German by birth, scoffs at Hugo, claiming that 
his greatest gift was a lack of good taste, a condition 
so rare in Frenchmen that his compatriots mistook it 
for genius. He sees merely a studied passion and an 
artificial flame in Hugo's specious divine fire ; and the 
product is nothing but " fried ice." And Heine sums 
him up : " Hugo was more than an egoist, he was a 
Hugoist." 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 417 



Charles Dickens describes Madame Hugo as " a lit- 
tle, sallow lady, with dark, flashing eyes." Making 
the round of Paris with John Forster, in the winter of 
1846-47, they came to this '' noble corner house in the 
Place Royale." They were struck by its painted ceil- 
ings and wonderful carvings, the old-gold furniture 
and superb tapestries ; and, more than all, by a canopy 
of state out of some palace of the Middle Ages. It 
is worthy of note here that Hugo was almost the first 
man of his period — a deplorable period for taste in 
all lands — to value and collect antiques of all sorts. 
They were a fit setting for these rooms, and for the 
youth and loveliness that crowded them, up to the open 
windows on the old square. The young smokers 
among the men were driven forth to stroll under its 
arcades, recalling the strollers of Corneille's and Mo- 
liere's time, albeit these were painfully ignorant of 
tobacco bliss, so loud were the papal thunders against 
its temptations then. 

Dickens and Forster found Hugo the best thing in 
that house, and the latter records the sober grace and 
self-possessed, quiet gravity of the man, recently en- 
nobled by Louis-Philippe, but whose nature was al- 
ready written noble. " Rather under the middle size, 
of compact, close biittoned-up figure, with ample dark 
hair falling loosely over his close-shaven face. I never 
saw upon any features, so keenly intellectual, such a 
soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never heard 
the French language spoken with the picturesque dis- 
tinctness given it by Victor Hugo." 



41 8 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Within the portal of the Church of Saint-Paul-et- 
Saint-Louis, in Rue Saint-Antoine, on either side, is 
a lovely shell holding holy-water, given by Hugo in 
commemoration of the first communion of his eldest 
child, Leopoldine. In this church she and young 
Charles Vacquerie were married in February, 1842. 
Both were drowned in August of that year. And this 
is the church selected by Monsieur Gillenormand for 
the marriage of Marius and Cosette, because the old 
gentleman considered it " more coquettish " than the 
church of his parish. For he lived much farther north 
in the Marais, at No. 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, 
where a new block of buildings has taken the place of 
his eighteenth-century dwelling. For this marriage, af- 
ter playing the obdurate and irascible godfather so long, 
he was suddenly transformed into a fairy godmother. 

Toward the end of 1848, after the escape of Louis- 
Philippe, Hugo moved to Rue dTsly, No. 5, for a short 
period, and then to No. 37, now No. 41 Rue de la Tour- 
d'Auvergne, where he remained until 185 1. In the 
Paris Bottin during these years he is entitled — consid- 
ering it, strangely to us, his especial distinction — 
"" Representant dii Peuple/' The youthful Royalist 
poet, the friend of Charles X., the friend later of Louis- 
Philippe, had become an oracle of Democracy. He 
added nothing to his honestly earned fame by his 
long-winded bombast in the Tribune; and however 
genuine his attitude may have been, it appealed almost 
entirely to the groundlings. 

They came in crowds about this house, with flaming 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 4i9 

torches and blaring bands, howling their windy hom- 
age. They are remembered, with mute disapproval, 
by the old concierge of the house, Lagoutte Armand. 
With real pleasure does he recall '' Monsieur Hugo," 
and prattle memories of his friends like Beranger, and 
of his family. There were two sons, Charles and Fran- 
cois-Victor, the former known as " Toto," a "" tres 
gentil gargon/' In his loge, pointed out with pride by 
the concierge, to whom it was given by Hugo, is a 
rare engraving of the poet, which makes him serious, 
almost stern, of aspect, his mouth showing its strength 
in the beardless face, his hair plastered down about 
the superb brow. His head was carried always well 
bent forward, and he went gravely, the old man tells 
us. The house is unaltered, but the street has grown 
commonplace since the days when its half-countryfied 
cut attracted Hugo and Beranger and Alphonse Karr. 
This witty editor of " Les Guepes," something of a 
poseur with his pen, had a genuine love of flowers and 
of women, on whom he lavished his pet camelias and 
tulips. He cultivated them in the garden of the house, 
now numbered 15, which he occupied in this street 
from 1839 to 1842. The sculptor Carrier-Belleuse is 
now in possession of Karr's old rooms, and his studio 
covers the one-time garden. Beranger came, in 1832, 
to No. 31, then a small cottage behind a garden, where 
he lived for three years. The bare walls of the com- 
munal school, numbered 35, noAv cover the site of his 
home, and there are no more cottages nor gardens in 
the street. 



420 THE STONES OF PARIS 

From 1 85 1, when the coup-d'etat of December drove 
him first into hiding and then into exile, through all 
the years of the empire, we find in each year's Bottin: 

" Hugo, Victor, Vicomte de, de I'Institut, " 

These dots represent a home unknown to the Paris 
directory ; no home indeed, for there can be none for a 
Frenchman beyond his country's borders. Of Hugo's 
dwellings during these years nothing need be said here, 
save that his long residence in Guernsey gave him his 
characters and colors for " Les Travailleurs de la 
Mer," and such slight acquaintance with seafaring and 
ships as is shown in " Quatre-Vingt-Treize." Where 
he got the fantastic English details of " L'Homme-qui- 
rit," no man shall ever know. 

Here, too, he finished " Les Miserables," writing it, 
he said, with all Paris lying before him in his mind's 
eye ; or, as he puts it, with the exile's longing, '" on re- 
garde la mer, et on voit Paris/' His topographical 
memory was none too accurate, and errors of slight or 
of real importance may be detected in " Les Miser- 
ables." It is really in his poetry that he has done for 
his " maternal city " what Balzac did for her in prose ; 
singing in all tones the splendor and the squalor of "' la 
ville lumiere," to use his swelHng phrase. Despite 
some errors, and despite the pulling-about of Paris 
since Valjean's day, we may still trace his flight 
through nearly all that thrilling night, when Javert 
and his men hunted him about the southern side of 
the town, and across the river from the Gorbeau tene- 
ment. This tenement, so striking a set in many scenes 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 421 

of the drama, was an historic mansion run to seed, 
standing just where Hugo places it — on the site of 
Nos. 50 and 52 Boulevard de I'Hopital, almost directly 
opposite Rue de la Barriere-des-Gobelins. Facing that 
street — renamed Rue Fagon in 1867 — on the northern 
side of Boulevard de I'Hopital, the little market of the 
Gobelins replaces the squalid old shanty which gave 
perilous shelter to Valjean and Cosette, and later to 
Marius. 

From here, driven by a nameless terror after his 
recognition of Javert in the beggar's disguise, the old 
convict started, leading Cosette by the hand. He took 
a winding way to the Seine, through the deserted 
region between the Jardin des Plantes and Val-de- 
Grace, turning strategically on his track in streets 
through which we can follow him as easily as did 
Javert. He was not certain that he was followed, un- 
til, turning in a dark corner, he caught full sight of 
the three men under the light before the police-station. 
Hugo places this station in Rue de Pontoise, and this 
is a mistake ; it was then and is still in the next parallel 
street. Rue de Poissy, at No. 31. 

Now, Valjean turns away from the river, carrying 
the tired child in his arms, and makes a long circuit 
around by the College Rollin — long since removed to 
the northern boulevards — and by the lower streets 
skirting the Jardin des Plantes — no longer the Jardin 
du Roi — and so along the quay. He is bent, as Javert 
guessed, on putting the river between himself and his 
pursuers. He crosses Pont d'Austerlitz, and plunges 



422 THE STONES OF PARIS 

into the maze of roads and lanes, lined with woodyards 
and walls, on the northern side of the river. There 
Javert loses the trail ; while for us, that trail is hidden 
under new streets laid out along those lanes, and un- 
der railway tracks laid down on those roads. We 
come in sight of the fugitive again, as he climbs the 
convent v/all, drawing up Cosette by the rope taken 
from the street lantern. Here is that high gray wall, 
stretching along the eastern side of old Rue de Picpus, 
and the southern side of the new wide Avenue Saint- 
Mande. This wall — of stone, covered with crumbling 
plaster — is as old as the garden of "" Les Religieuses de 
Picpus,'' which it surrounds, and as the buildings with- 
in, which it hides from the street. We may enter the 
enclosure by the old gate at No. 35 Rue de Picpus, the 
very gate through which Cosette was carried out in a 
basket, and Valjean borne alive in the nun's coffin to 
his mock burial. About the court within, the red-tiled 
low roofs of the ancient foundation peep out among 
more modern buildings. Behind all these and beyond 
the court stretches the garden, a portion still set aside 
for vegetables, and we look about for Fauchele vent's 
protecting glasses for his cherished melons. What we 
do find is the very outhouse, in an angle of the wall, 
on which Valjean dropped ; it is a shanty nearly gone 
to ruin, but serving still to store the garden tools of 
Fauchelevent's successor. 

" Near the old village of Picpus, now a part of the 
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under the walls of the gar- 
den which belonged to the Canoness of Saint-Augus- 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 



423 




IJoIam 7ulUcj i<nu(/ 



\ . _ '^^a-^ 



The Cemetery of Picpus. 

tin, in a bit of ground not more than thirty feet in 
length, repose thirteen hundred and six victims be- 
headed at Barriere du Trone, between 26 Prairial 
and p Thermidor, in the second year of the repubHc." 



424 THE STONES OE PARIS 

This extract, from the " Memorial Europeen " of April 
24, 1809, is a fitting introduction to the small cemetery, 
hid away at the very end of this convent garden. In 
this snug resting-spot sleep many illustrious dead. On 
the wall, alongside the iron-railed gate, under a laurel- 
wTeath, is a tablet inscribed with the name of " Andre 
de Chenier, son of Greece and of France," who " servit 
les Muses, aima la sagesse, inourut pour la verite." He 
and his headless comrades were carted here and thrown 
into trenches, when the guillotine was busy at the Bar- 
riere du Trone, now Place de la Nation, only a step 
away, in the early summer of 1794, up to the day of 
Robespierre's arrest. Their mothers, widows, chil- 
dren, dared not visit this great grave nor, indeed, ask 
where it was. In that time of terror, grief was a crime 
and tears were no longer innocent. It was only in after 
years that this bit of ground was bought, and walled 
in, and cared for, by unforgetting survivors. Some 
few among them, of high descent or of ancient family, 
planned for their own graves and those of their line 
to come and to go, within touch of this great common 
grave that held the clay of those dear to them. They 
bought, In perpetuity, this bit of the convent garden 
on the hither side of the gate, through which we have 
been looking, and it is dotted with many a cross and 
many a slab. And this tiny burial-ground draws the 
American pilgrim as to a shrine, for in it lies the body 
of Lafayette. 

The sisters of the Seminaire de Picpus, who inher- 
ited the duties, along with the domain of "" Les Religie- 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 425 



uses" of the eighteenth century, devote themselves to 
the instruction and the training of their young pension- 
naires. The story of the estabhshment is told in " Les 
Miserables," in detail that allows no retelling. 

Fauchelevent had planned to carry off his tippling 
crony of the Vaugirard Cemetery to the tap-room, 
'' Au bon Going/' and so get Valjean out of his coffin. 
To his horror, he found the drunkard replaced by a 
new grave-digger, who refused to drink, and Valjean 
was nearly buried alive. We will, if it please you, 
visit the '' Good Quince," no longer in its old quarters, 
for it quitted them when the historic Cemetery of Vau- 
girard was closed forever. On its ground, at the cor- 
ner of Rue de Vaugirard and Boulevard Pasteur, has 
been built the Lycee Buffon. To be near the then 
newly opened burial-ground of Mont-Parnasse, '' Au 
bon Going" put up its sign on the front of a two- 
storied shanty, at the corner of Boulevard Edgar- 
Quinet and Rue de la Gaiete, a street strangely mis- 
guided in title in this joyless neighborhood. About 
the bar on this corner crowd the grave-diggers and 
workmen from the near-at-hand graves, and at the 
tables sit mourners from poor funerals, all intent on 
washing the smell of fresh mould from out their nos- 
trils. This den is the assommoir of this quarter, 
swarming, noisy, noisome. 

On those summer days, when Hugo used to stroll 
from his cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs out 
to the southern slopes, he discovered the Champ de 
I'Alouette — a fair field bordering the limpid Bievre, 



426 THE STONES OF PARIS 

just beyond the factory of the GobeHns. It had borne 
that name from immemorial time, and was the field, 
as the man told Marius, where Ulbach had killed the 
shepherdess of Ivry. Marius came to this green spot 
that he might dream about " The Lark," after he had 
heard, from his peep-hole in the wall of the Gorbeau 
tenement, the Thenardiers so name his unknown lady. 
We, too, may walk in the Field of the Lark, its ancient 
spaciousness somewhat shrunken, as with all those 
erstwhile fields hereabout, of which we get glimpses 
along Boulevard Saint- Jacques and other distant south- 
ern boulevards. There is a wide gateway in the high 
wall that runs along stony Rue du Champ-de-rAlouette, 
and we pass through it and the court within to the 
bright little garden beyond, where children are play- 
ing, guileless as Cosette. This is her field, now shut 
in by great tanneries, its air redolent of, leather, its 
Bievre sullied by the stains and the scum of the dye- 
works above. Yet, hid away in this dreary quarter — 
where the broad and cheerless streets are sultry in 
summer, bleak in winter, and gritty to the feet all the 
year round — it is still, as Hugo aptly says, the only 
spot about here where Ruysdael would have been 
tempted to stop, and sit, and sketch. 

Among the countless American feet that tread Rue 
du Bac and Rue de Babylone, on their way to the shop 
that is a shrine at the junction of those two streets, 
there may be some few that turn into Rue Oudinot. 
It is well worth the turning, if only because it has 
contrived to keep that village aspect given by gardens 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 425 

behind walls, and cottages within those gardens. It 
still bore its old name, Plumet, when General Hugo 
came to live in it, that he might be near his son in Rue 
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and here he died suddenly 
in January, 1828. In this house, well known to Hugo, 
he installed Valjean and the girl Cosette. From this 
house, by its back door and by the lane between high 
parallel walls, Valjean slips out unseen into Rue de 
Babylone. In its front garden, under a stone on her 
bench, Cosette finds her wonderful love-letter; and 
here is the scene of that exquisite love-making, when 
Marius appears in the moonlight. 

The trumpery tumults of 1832 — in hopeless revolt 
against the Orleans monarchy and in impotent ad- 
venture for the republic — give occasion for grandiose 
barricade-building and for melodramatic combats. 
Hugo takes us, with Marius and his fellow-students, 
to that labyrinth of narrowest lanes, twisting about 
high bluffs of houses, that was then to be found be- 
tween the churches of Saint-Leu and Saint-Eustache. 
It was a most characteristic corner of mediaeval Paris, 
and it has, only recently and not yet entirely, been cut 
away by Rue Rambuteau, and built over by the busi- 
ness structures around the Halles. The street of la 
Grande-Truanderie is for the most part respectabilized, 
that of la Chanverie is reformed quite out of life, and 
la Petite-Truanderie alone remains narrow and mal- 
odorous. But " Corinthe " has been carted clean away. 
This was the notorious tavern, of two-storied stone, 
in front of which Enjolras defended his barricade, 



428 THE STONES OF PARIS 

within which Grantaire emptied his last bottle, and in 
whose upper room these two stood up against the wall 
to be shot. Grantaire was doubtless sketched from 
his illustrious precursor and prototype, the poet, Ma- 
thurin Regnier, who tippled and slept at a table of 
this squalid drinking-den during many years, until the 
year 1615, when debauchery killed him too young. 
His colossal and abused body carried the soul, orig- 
inal, virile, and fiery, which he has put into his verse, 
although he has over-polished it a bit. When this 
tavern — in the fields near the open markets — was his 
favorite resort, it bore the sign and name, '' Pot-aiix- 
Roses" ; it was dedicated later '' Au Raisin de Co^ 
rinthe"; and this was soon popularly shortened to 
'' Corinthe." Forty years after his death, another true 
poet was born in the tall house that rose alongside this 
tavern, its windows looking out over the waste lands 
of the Marais, as Jean-Frangois Regnard says in his 
verse. Like young Poquelin, thirty years before, this 
boy played about the Halles ; then he went away to 
strange adventures in foreign lands with pirates and 
with ladies ; and came home here to write comedies, 
that have the gayety and sparkle, yet not the depth, 
of those of Moliere. Indeed, Voltaire asserts that he 
who is not pleased with Regnard is not fit to admire 
Moliere. The seventeenth-century mansion, in which 
he was born, befitted the position of his father, a rich 
city merchant, and it has luckily escaped demolition, 
albeit brought down to base uses, as you shall see on 
looking at No. 108 Rue Rambuteau. And if you hurry 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 429 

to this neighborhood, you may yet find some few re- 
minders of the scenes of 1832. In Rue de la Petite- 
Truanderie is just such a tavern as was '" Corinthe," 
in its worst days. Its huge square pillars will hardly 
hold up, much longer, the aged stone walls. Just here 
is the dark corner where Valjean set Javert free; and 
in Rue Mondetour, at that end not yet shortened and 
straightened into a semblance of respectability, you 
may see a small sewer-mouth, direct descendant of the 
grated hole, down which Valjean crawled, with Marius 
on his back, to begin that almost incredible march 
through the tortuous sewers to their outlet on the 
Seine, under Cours-la-Reine. He came out on a spit 
of sand, '' not very far distant from the house brought 
to Paris in 1824," says Hugo, who should have said 
1826. His reference is to the house popularly named 
'' la maison de Frangois P''." It was built by that 
monarch, at Moret on the edge of the forest of Fon- 
tainebleau, for his beloved sister. Marguerite de Na- 
varre, it is believed. It was removed, stone by stone, 
and re-erected on its present site in Cours-la-Reine, 
where it is a delight to the lover of French Renaissance. 
Hugo was one of the earliest, among the exiles of 
the Empire that ended worthily in the shame of Sedan, 
to be welcomed by the new Republic on his hastening 
to Paris. There he remained through VAnnee Terrible 
of the Prussian siege, with his friend Paul Meurice, 
a hale veteran of letters, still in the youth of age in 
1899. Paris being once more opened, Hugo went to 
and fro between Brussels and Guernsey and his own 



430 THE STONES OF PARIS 

country for awhile. In 1873 he had quarters in the 
Villa Montmorenci at Auteuil, we learn by a letter 
from him dated there. In 1874 he settled in an apart- 
ment at No. 66 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, an airy spot 
at the summit of the slope upward toward Montmartre. 
Here he remained a year, and in 1875 removed a little 
farther along this same slope, to No. 21 Rue de Clichy, 
on the corner of Rue d'Athenes. His apartment on 
the third floor was bright and sunny, having windows 
quite around the corner on both streets, and here he 
lived for four years. Much of the last two years was 
taken up by his new duties as Senator, so that scant 
leisure was left him for literary labor; and it was in 
this house that he sadly told a favorite comrade that 
the works he had dreamed of writing were infinitely 
more numerous than those he had found time to write. 
Driven from here by the unremitting invasion of 
friends, admirers, strangers, men and women from all 
quarters of the globe, bent on a sight of or an auto- 
graph from the only Hugo, he took refuge in Avenue 
d'Eylau, away off at the other end of the town, where 
only real friendship would take the trouble to follow 
him. He made this last removal in 1880. This final 
home was as modest as any of his childhood homes, 
and had just such a garden as theirs. Here he passed 
five happy years, with cherished companionship with- 
in, and all about him '' honor, love, obedience, troops 
of friends." 

As a tribute to him, Avenue d'Eylau has become 
Avenue Victor-Hugo, and his two-story-and-attic house 







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Victor Hugo. 

(From the portrait by Bonnat.) 



\_From a carbon print by Braun, Clement (Sr" Cb.] 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 431 

— not one bit grander than the cottage in Rue Notre- 
Dame-des-Champs, in which began his Hterary fame — 
remains unchanged under its new number 124, only its 
side garden having been built over, the garden in the 
rear being left unspoiled. At No. 140 of the avenue, 
the residence of M. Lockroy, is preserved the original 
death-mask of the poet, taken by the sculptor, M. 
Dalou. It is a most striking portrait, and one wishes 
that copies might be permitted. 

Here he died in 1885, and from here his body was 
carried by France to the Pantheon, there to be placed 
among all her other glories by a grateful country. De- 
spite the ostentation of the pauper's hearse decreed by 
this rich man, no more solemn and imposing spectacle 
has been seen by eyes that have looked on many pag- 
eants, civil and military, in many lands ; even more 
impressive in the attitude of the closely packed con- 
course — hushed, motionless, with bared heads — that 
gazed all through that hot May day at the slow-moving 
cortege, than in that magnificent retinue, escorting to 
his grave ** The Sublime Child," grown gray in the 
service of his country's letters. 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 



II 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 

The prehistoric savages, who settled, for safety from 
onslaught, on the largest of the islands in the Seine, 
known to us as lie de la Cite ; the rabble of Gaulish 
fisherfolk, who came to camp here in after-years ; the 
little tribe of Parisii who later builded a fortified ham- 
let on this sure ground, and bridged it with the main- 
land: all these, looking, through the centuries, north- 
wardly across the transparent and unsullied stream, 
saw the flat river-bank opposite, over beyond it a ring 
of low wooded hills, and between these, on either hand, 
broad expanses of marsh, morass, and forest. That 
which stretched to their right is our Marais. In it the 
veteran Camulogenus, captaining the Parisii, hoped to 
mire down the Roman soldiers, once already stuck in the 
mud along the Bievre on the southern bank of the Seine. 
But it is Labienus, that ablest of Caesar's lieutenants, 
who '' marches with four legions to Lutetia. (This is 
the fortress of the Parisii, situated on an island in the 
river Seine.)" And Labienus knows the country as 
well as his trade, and skirts around the Marais, and 
crosses the Seine at Auteuil to the solid ground he has 
chosen on the plains of Crenelle. There he wins bat- 
tle in the year 52 b.c.^ and drives the Gauls in disorder 

435 



436 THE STONES OF PARIS 

to the high ground on which the Pantheon now stands, 
and the Luxembourg Gardens He. The Romans, in pos- 
session of the island, rebuild the bridges, cut away by 
the Parisii, and restore the town partly burned by them ; 
a palace for the resident Governors arises on the ex- 
treme western end of the island ; and new defences are 
constructed for the Gallo-Roman Lutetia. Four cen- 
turies later, it was called his " dear and well-beloved 
Lutetia " by Julian, and from that conviction he was 
never apostate. He loved it for its soft air, its fair 
river, its honest wines coming from its own vineyards. 
On the slope of its southern suburb stood out the 
massive walls of the baths that bear his name ; and his 
gardens, planted with vines, reached to the river. 
Where he swam, we go dry-shod, when we saunter 
through the Cluny; and we may sit, a little farther 
south, in Rue de Navarre just off Rue Monge, in the 
stone seats of the Roman arena, a perfect bit of loyal 
preservation of Lutetia. 

The Romans meant to make their new town an im- 
portant centre, and those impassioned road-builders be- 
gan to bring to it the highways, in the making of which, 
and by means of which, they were easily masters of their 
world. The Gauls had trodden footpaths through the 
forests and over the marshes, and of these, the two most 
trodden on the northern bank started from near the end 
of their only bridge, now replaced by Pont Notre-Dame. 
That which went northerly to the southeastern corner 
of the Halles of our Paris, there split into two branches ; 
the one, named the Voie des Provinces Maritimes, fol- 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAlS 437 



lowed nearly the line of present Rue Montmartre, and 
went, by way of Pontoise, to the northwestern coast of 
Gaul ; the other, named the Voie des Provinces du Nord, 
ran from the Halles on a line between Rues Saint- 
Martin and Saint-Denis, about where now Boulevard 
Sebastopol stretches. It was the high road to Saint- 
Denis, SenHs, Soissons, and so away to the north. The 
other main pathway turned toward the east, just above 
the bridge-end, and went nearly parallel with the river- 
bank, along the line of present Rue Saint-Antoine. 
This road, to Sens and Meaux and thence eastwardly, 
was knov/n as the Voie des Provinces de I'Est, and 
later in life as the Voie Royale. 

This pathway was diked by the Romans, and when 
sufficiently raised, it was paved with stones. Even then 
it was often submerged, and the marsh over which it 
went made more marshy, by frequent floods of the swol- 
len Seine, overwashing its slight banks; and by the 
ceaseless streams that carried down through this bowl 
the waters of the encircling slopes of Montmartre, 
Belleville, Chaumont, Menilmontant. In our stroll 
through the Marais, you will" walk above one of these 
streams, serving as a sewer to-day, and along the bank 
of still another, turned into the Gare de I'Arsenal. 

On the two sides of this raised road, bit by bit the 
bog was planted; foot by foot the swamp was re- 
claimed; gardens were cultivated, farms were tilled, 
flocks were fed ; herdsmen's huts dotted the plain ; on 
the higher spots farmers' houses peeped from among 
the trees; and on the slopes above, all around from 



438 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Chaillot to Charonne, shone the white walls of the vil- 
las — walls of marble from Italy — of great officials and 
of wealthy traders. The Church came along this road 
from its central seat at Sens, and, keen of eye, picked 
out choice sites for chapels, convents, monasteries. Lit- 
tle by little the entire Marais was levelled up as the sur- 
rounding hills were levelled down ; yet keeping so well 
its forests, that it gave good hiding for eight years to 
Saint-Denis dodging Valerian's pursuit, until that day 
of the saint's long and winding walk down the street 
of his name, his head carried in his hands. This north- 
ern suburb grew more gradually, at first, than its south- 
ern sister, whose sunny breast had enticements for gar- 
deners and for vine-growers. It was a strong man 
who woke the Marais to unwonted life, and by his 
wall, encircling and securing it, Philippe-Auguste 
quickened its sluggish suburban pulse into urban ani- 
mation. The northern settlements became la Ville, 
the island being la Cite, and the southern suburb 
VUniversite. 

There was a beach or strand — la greve — near the 
middle of this northern bank, at which were moored and 
unloaded the boats bringing to the town light mer- 
chandise, such as grain, meats, stuffs, and fabrics. All 
heavy goods — timber, stone, metals — came to the Port 
Saint-Paul, in front of Quai des Celestins ; still there 
under its old name, but its old business long since gone 
to the bustling Port de Crenelle. On the Greve gath- 
ered men out of place, wandering about while waiting 
for work ; whence comes the modern meaning of greve 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 439 

— a strike, when men get out of place and are not 
anxious for a job. Here on the Greve, as their com- 
mon ground, met the men who carried goods by water 
from up and down stream, and the men who carried 
goods by land, to and from the provinces. They were 
strong and turbulent men, and they made two mighty 
guilds, and these two, combined with other guilds, 
formed an all-powerful confraternity. In the course 
of years, there came to its head, as Prevot des Mar- 
chands, that demigod of democracy, the notable Etienne 
Marcel. He had his home, while living, on Place de 
Greve, and in the river, when dead ; to-day, in bronze 
he bestrides his bronze horse between those two dwell- 
ing-places, facing the strand he ruled and the city he 
tried to rule. It is he — none more worthy — who shall 
marshal us on our way to the Marais. 

For, when Jean IL, " le Bon," was sent to his long 
captivity in England from the field of Poictiers, won by 
the Black Prince in 1356, it was the first Dauphin France 
had had, known later as Charles V., who acted as Regent 
in his father's absence. He was a sickly and a studious 
youth, easily alarmed by the violence of these guilds, 
now making one more savage assault on royal preroga- 
tives, ij;i a desperate stroke to secure the right of the 
townsmen to rule their town. The Dauphin was afraid 
of being trapped in the Louvre, and he took refuge 
in the old Palace of the City. To him forces his way, 
one day, the boisterous Marcel at the head of three 
thousand armed and howling men, kills two of the royal 
marshals in the Presence, and places his own cap of the 



440 THE STONES OF PARIS 

town colors, red and blue — these were combined with 
the Bourbon white to make the Tricolor, centuries later 
— on the head of the terrified Dauphin, either to protect 
him, or in insolent token of this new recruit to the fac- 
tion. As soon as might be, the Dauphin got away from 
his revolted citizens, and came back to his town only 
when strong enough to hold it against them. Nor 
would he then trust himself to a permanent residence 
in the Island-Palace, and it was allowed to fall into dis- 
repair through several successive reigns. Louis XII. 
made partial restorations, and occasionally sojourned 
in his palace " in mid-stream," that made him think 
of his Loire. Parliament already owned the building 
then, by gift from Charles VIL, and since then it has 
always been known as the Palais de Justice. The re- 
turned Dauphin took up his abode in the Hotel 
d'Etampes, in the quarter of Saint-Paul, outside Phil- 
ippe- Auguste's wall ; and, by successive purchases, se- 
cured other neighboring hotels and their grounds. This 
spacious enceinte, within its own walls, stretched from 
behind the gardens of the Archbishop of Sens, on the 
river front, and from the grounds of the Celestins, just 
east of them, on Port Saint-Paul — where the Dauphin's 
new estate had a grand portal and entrance-way from 
the quay and the river — away back to Rue Saint- An- 
toine on the north ; and from just outside the old wall, 
eastwardly to the open country. This domain, and the 
suburbs that had grown beyond that old wall, toward 
the north, now came to be embraced within a new en- 
closure. On the southern side of the river there 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 44i 

seemed no need for any enlargement of the old en- 
closure. 

This wall, known in history as the wall of Charles V., 
was partly quite new, partly an extension or a strength- 
ening of a wall begun by Marcel in 1356; under the 
pretext of '' works of defence of the kingdom against 
the English," and carried on in offence of his royal mas- 
ter. But before he had finished it, he came to his own 
end, opportunely for everyone but himself. It is mid- 
night of July 31, 1358, and he is hastening, in darkness 
and stealth, to open his own gate of Saint- Antoine for 
the entrance of the combined forces of the English and 
of Charles the Bad, of Navarre. In Froissart's words : 
'' The same night that this should have been done, God 
inspired certain burgesses of the city . . . who, by 
divine inspiration, as it ought to be supposed, were in- 
formed that Paris should be that night destroyed." So 
they armed and made their way to Porte Saint-An- 
toine, *' and there they found the provost of merchants 
with the keys of the gates in his hands ; " and their 
leader, John Maillart, asked, " Stephen, what do you 
here at this hour ? " When Stephen told John not to 
meddle, John told Stephen : " By God, you're not here 
for any good, at this hour, and I'll prove it to you." And 
so, as his notion of proof, " he gave with an axe on 
Stephen's head, that he fell down to the earth — and yet 
he was his gossip." Thus died Stephen Marcel, the 
martyr of devotion to the liberties of his fellow-citizens, 
in the eyes of many. To others of us, he is the original 
of the modern patriot of another land, who thanked God 



442 THE STONES OF PARIS 

that he had a country — to sell ; and his ignoble death 
seems to be the just execution of a traitor. It is due to 
him to own that he was a strong man, genuine and piti- 
less in his convictions, and might have merited well of 
his town and his country, but that the good in him was 
poisoned by his rapacity for power, and polluted by per- 
sonal hatred of the Dauphin. His naked body, before 
being thrown into the Seine, lay exposed for days in 
front of the Convent of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des- 
Ecoliers, whose grounds stretched from without the 
old wall, eastwardly along the northern side of Rue 
Saint-Antoine. Through them was cut our present 
Rue Sevigne, and it was on the spot made now by the 
corner of that street and Rue Saint-Antoine, half way 
between the old gate and the new gate just built by 
Marcel, that the crowd gathered to gaze on his corpse. 

Froissart rightly claims, referring to Marcel's pro- 
jected wall with his customary delightful enthusiasm, 
that it was '' a great deed to furnish an arm, and to 
close with defence, such a city as Paris. Surely it was 
the best deed that ever any provost did there, for else 
it had been, after divers times, overrun and robbed by 
divers occasions." It was a greater deed that was now 
done by Charles V., and his Provost of Paris, Hugues 
Aubriot ; and their new wall is well worth a little jour- 
ney along its line, easily traced on our Paris map. 

We have already made a visit to Quai des Celestins, 
and have read the tablet that marks the place where 
played Moliere and his troupe, in 1645 ; and the other 
tablet that shows the site of Philippe-Auguste's Bar- 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 443 



beau tower, constructed toward 1200, and taking its 
name from the great Abbey of Barbeau, whose ex- 
tensive grounds bordered the river-bank here. From 
this huge tower and its gateway, kept intact as the 
starting-point at this end, the new wall turned at a right 
angle to the fast crumbling old wall, and went east- 
wardly along the shore ; which they now banked up and 
planted with elms. That shore-line is now Boulevard 
Morland — named from that brave colonel of chasseurs 
who was killed at Austerlitz— and the land in front, as 

A 

far as Quai Henri IV., was anciently the little He des 
Javiaux, renamed He Louvier in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, when it served as a vast woodyard for the town. 
The slight arm of the river that cut it off has been 
filled in, and the island is now one with the mainland. 
At the corner of Boulevard Bourdon — which records 
the name of a colonel of dragoons, who fell at Auster- 
litz — the new wall turned, and followed what is now 
the middle line of that boulevard to the present Place 
de la Bastille. Here was the two-round-towered gate- 
way built by Marcel, and called, as were called all those 
gateways, Bastilia — a word of mediaeval Latin, meaning 
a small fortress, such as was formed by each of these 
gates with its flanking towers. There were many of 
them opening into and guarding the town, that of Saint- 
Denis being the only other one of the size of this of 
Saint- Antoine ; which was enlarged into the massive 
fortress known to us as the Bastille. 

Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old 
prison, we shall awaken only one; that of Hugues 



444 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Aubriot, its builder and its first tenant. Made Provost 
of Paris by Charles V. — who, after his hapless experi- 
ence with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more 
Provost of Merchants — Aubriot had many enemies 
among the guilds and among the clerics. He was frank 
and outspoken of speech, humane to the priest-despoiled 
and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal 
master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he 
returned their children, caught and christened by force. 
So, on the very day of the burial of his royal master, 
in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested for heresy, 
and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, 
" pour faire penitence perpetitelle, au pain de tristesse, 
et a I'eau de douleur." The Church sentence gives a 
poetic touch to prosaic bread and water. Aubriot fed 
only a short time on these delicacies, for he was rescued 
by the mob that, for the moment, idolized him, and led 
in triumph to his home. That home, from which he 
speedily fled out of Paris in terror of his rescuers, 
was given by Charles V. to this good servant, and we 
may stop, just here, to look on what is left of it. 

Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we 
enter Passage Charlemagne, and go through an outer 
into an inner court. In its northwestern corner is a 
tower containing an old-time spiral staircase. This 
is the only visible vestige of the palace of the Provost 
of Paris, its unseen portions being buried under, 
or incorporated with, the structures of the Lycee 
Charlemagne, just behind us toward the east. The 
boundary railing, between this college and the Church 



THE MAKING OF THE MAR A IS 



445 




The Hotel du Prevot. 



of Saint-Paul-et- Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line of 
Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side 
of that wall, the provost's palace, with its grounds, 
stretched to Rue Prevot, then Rue Percee ; that name 
still legible in the carved lettering on its corner with 



446 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand 
here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose 
northern Hne was on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower 
before us has been sadly modernized and newly painted, 
but its fabric is intact, with its original, square, wide- 
silled openings at each of the three landing-places of the 
old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender 
arch, a timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder 
growth we shall see presently in the Hotel de Sens. 
Above this arch a superimposed story, its window 
cut in line with the others below, has taken the place 
of the battlements. On either side the tower joins a 
building obviously later than it in date, although it 
has been claimed that all three structures are fifteenth- 
century work. The high arch and the other decorations 
of the tower are undoubtedly of that time, but they are, 
as undoubtedly, applied over the small stones of a much 
more ancient fabric. This conviction is reinforced by 
the sentiment that makes us see Charles the Wise come 
into this court, with his good Aubriot, enter that low 
door, and climb that staircase, looking out through 
those windows as he mounts. In the year of that King's 
death there was born a future owner of this tower 
and its palace. This was Pierre de Giac, a charming 
specimen of the gang that helped John of Burgundy and 
Louis of Orleans in their ruin of France — the only job 
in which they were ever at one. Pierre de Giac, after 
betraying both sides, fell into the strong clutch of the 
Duke of Richmond, by whom, after torture, he was 
tied in a bag and flung into the Seine. His crony, 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 447 

Louis d'Orleans, had possession of this property in the 
closing years of the fourteenth century, when he in- 
stituted the order of the Pore-Epic in honor of the 
baptism of his eldest son, Charles the Poet. The family 
emblem which gave its name to this order, gave it also to 
this hotel, to which it still clings. 

Going back to Place de la Bastille, on our map, 
we may follow the course of the new town wall along 
the curve of the inner boulevards, to Porte Saint-Denis ; 
whence it took a straight southwesterly course, parallel 
with present Rue Aboukir, through Place des Victoires 
and the Bank of France, and diagonally across the gar- 
dens of the Palais-Royal, to the gate of Saint-Honore, 
nearly in the centre of our Place du Theatre-Frangais. 
It was this gate and its protecting works that were 
pounded by the "" eanons et coulevrines " of Joan of 
Arc, and it was this portion of the wall which was 
assaulted by her at the head of her men; an assault 
that would have succeeded, and so have given Paris 
to the French, had she not been struck down by a cross- 
bow bolt, so striking panic to her followers. When you 
come out from the Credit Lyonnais on the corner of 
Avenue de TOpera and Place du Theatre-Franqais, or 
when you look at the shining display in the shop-win- 
dow alongside, " Aux Nouvelles Armes de la Chasse," 
you are standing, as near as may be, on the spot where 
she fell wounded on September 8, 1429. Her tent was 
pitched, and her head-quarters fixed, on the outer slope 
of the Butte des Moulins,a few feet north of where now 
stands the apse of the Church of Saint-Roch. From 



448 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Porte Saint-Honore, the wall went direct, across pres- 
ent Place du Carrousel, to the round Tour de Bois on 
the river-shore, and from that tower a chain was swung 
slantwise up-stream to the Tour de Nesle on the south- 
ern bank. 

This great wall, when quite finished, was an admir- 
able example of mediaeval mural masonry. Besides its 
round gate-towers, it was strengthened by many square 
towers, and was crenellated, and had frequent strong 
sentry-boxes and watch-towers between the battle- 
ments. On the outside was a wide, deep ditch bank-full 
of water. All stood intact until partly levelled by Louis 
XIII. in 1634, and entirely so by Louis XIV. in 1666, 
during which thirty years the popular pun had run: 
" Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant." It 
was about 1670 that the boulevards were laid out over 
the foundations of the wall, its ditch filled in, and trees 
planted. Two of the gates were kept, enlarged, and 
made into triumphal arches ; and these Portes Saint- 
Denis and Saint-Martin stand there to-day, dingy 
memorials of Ludovican pride and pomposity. A cen- 
tury later, in 1770, every trace of wall and moat was 
wiped away, the driveway was partly paved, and build- 
ing began; but it was not until 1830 that sidewalks 
were made, and that grand mansions replaced the for- 
mer shabby structures. We cannot put hand on any 
stone of the wall itself, to-day. 

Within the enceinte thus made, our Marais was at 
length entirely enclosed ; away from its river-front, bor- 
dered by abbeys and monasteries; through its streets, 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 449 

walled off by palaces and mansions ; and its other 
streets, packed with modest dwellings and shops ; far 
back to the gardens and the vineyards, and the waste 
fields not yet tilled, that spread all around the inner zone 
of the wall. Within it, too, was brought the vast domain 
of the Templars, covering the space from this outer wall 
away south to Rue de la Verrerie, and between Rues 
du Temple and Vieille-du-Temple. It was partly under 
cultivation, partly left wild to forest and bog, this por- 
tion being known as the Marais du Temple. Farther 
north were the buildings — palaces, priories, chapels — 
all secure within their own crenellated wall, all com- 
manded and defended by the moated and towered cita- 
del known as the Temple. 

The order had been founded early in crusading days, 
in the beginning of the twelfth century, by nine French 
gentlemen and knights, who, clad in white robes marked 
with a red cross, devoted themselves to the service and 
the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Louis VIL 
gave them this waste land late in the same century. 
The small godly body, vowed to poverty and humility, 
grew large in numbers and appetite, great in wealth and 
pride. Its knights were equal with princes, its monks 
were bankers for kings, and all had become simply a 
gang of sanctimonious brigands. A Capet saw the 
birth of the order, a Capet thought it time to strangle 
it as it neared its two-hundredth birthday. Philippe 
IV., " le Bel," less solicitous for the genuine faith than 
for the good coin of the Templars, laid hands on them 
and on it. He got rid of them by axe and stake and in 



450 THE STONES OF PARIS 

other ways approved of in that day, and parcelled out 
their lands ; through which streets were cut later, and 
building begun, when this new wall put them on its 
safe side. 

With the later history of the Temple we cannot con- 
cern ourselves, save to say that it long served as a 
sanctuary, later as a prison, and that its last stone was 
plucked away, six and a half centuries after it was laid, 
early in the nineteenth century. The palace of the 
Grand Prior stood exactly on the Rue du Temple front 
of the present Square du Temple. That little garden 
was his garden, and on its other edge, just at the junc- 
tion of Rues des Archives and Perree of to-day, rose 
the Tower, so famous and so infamous in prison annals. 

Safely settled in his Hotel Saint-Paul, within his 
own wall — Marcel quiet in his grave at last, the nobles 
curbed, the Jacquerie crushed — the young Dauphin, 
who had been weak and dissembling, and who was now 
grown, by long apprenticeship to his trade of royalty, 
into the strong, prudent, politic Charles V., known in 
history as Charles the Wise, made proclamation, on his 
accession in 1364, that this — '' I'hbtel solennel des 
grands ehastements" — should be henceforth the royal 
residence. In the old Palace on the Island was held the 
official court ; the Louvre, partly rebuilt and brightened 
by him, was kept for the occasional " sejour, souper, et 
gite " of roving royalty. Here in " Saint-Pol " was 
his home, from whose windows he looked out, with 
keen, patient, far-sighted vision, over the Paris and the 
France he had quelled and tranquillized, 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 45 1 



The Hotel Saint-Paul was a town in itself, of many 
mansions, big and little, of chateaux with their parks, 
of farms with gardens, of orchards, fish-ponds, fowl- 
houses, a menagerie. Sauval goes with gusto into de- 
tails of the buildings and their apartments, the decora- 
tions, furniture, and pavements; and the chronicle is 
appetizing of the dinners and banquets given to em- 
bassies and to honored visitors. Withal, pigeons 
perched on the carved balustrades, and guards lay on 
straw in the halls. It was a simple patriarchal life led 
here by Charles the Wise, and here begun by his son, 
Charles the Silly. A pretty, light-minded child of 
eleven, on his father's death, he remained a child 
through his dissolute and diseased early manhood, and 
through his later years of spasmodic madness and of 
intermittent reason, to his old age of permanent child- 
ishness. 

While in Paris, this was his abode, and here he was 
left, almost a prisoner to unconcerned servants, by his 
shameless wife, Isabeau de Baviere. When she saw 
him, once in a way, he looked on her with unknowing 
eyes, or with knowing eyes of horror. His only com- 
panion was the low-born Odette de Champdivers, and 
with her he played the cards that untrue tradition claims 
to have been invented for him. He prowled about 
these halls, in filthy rags, eaten by ulcers and vermin, 
gnawing his food with canine greed ; he ranged 
through these grounds, finding fellowship with the 
animals that were not let loose, but kept in cages. You 
may hunt up the stone walls of those cages — originally 



452 THE STONES OF PARIS 

on pointed arches with short Romanesque pillars — and 
the stone foundations of the royal stables, in the yards 
on the southern side of Rue des Lions ; a street whose 
name tells of these menageries, and that seems to echo 
with their roarings. The alleyway of cherry-trees 
now makes Rue de la Cerisaie, and Rue Beautreillis 
replaces the green tunnels of vines on trellises, where 
were gathered the grapes — good as are those of Tho- 
mery to-day — which produced the esteemed vin de 
Vhotel Saint-Paul. Along the farther edge of its 
grounds, just under the old wall, ran the lane that is 
now Rue des Jardins ; and Rue Charles V. keeps alive 
the memory of the founder of Saint- Paul. In all these 
streets, we are treading on the ground he loved. 

After the wretched mad king died here in 1422, roy- 
alty came no more to the Hotel Saint-Paul, and the 
place ran to waste. It was no home for the new 
Dauphin, come to his kingdom as Charles VII., by the 
grace of Joan of Arc and of God. His boyish memories 
were of a dreary childhood, between a mad father, a 
devilish mother who had hated him from his birth, 
and princely relatives raging and wrestling over those 
two for the power to misgovern France. Outside the 
royal madhouse, Paris was a butcher-shop. Burgun- 
dians and Armagnacs were howling crazy war-cries in 
every street, ambuscading and assassinating at every 
corner, equally thirsty for blood, but both surpassed in 
that thirst by the butchers and horse-knackers, led by 
Jean Caboche and called Cabochians. All these fac- 
tions, while intent solely on bloodshed, were loud- 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 453 



mouthed with loyalty and patriotism. They were all 
alike, and we may transfer to them and to their times 
the apt phrase of Joseph de Maistre, concerning 
the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew : '' Queiques scele- 
rats Hrent perir queiques scelerats." Almost every 
leader of men in those days came to his end by arms and 
in arms, and death by violence seemed the natural death. 
The town was a shambles ; corpses, mangled by butch- 
ers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets ; 
wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them ; the 
black-death and other plagues crept in to keep them 
company, and the English came marching on ; the while 
la dame Macabre whirled about the tombs in all the 
cemeteries. 

On the northern side of Rue Saint- Antoine, opposite 
the Hotel Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old 
hotel of Pierre d'Orgemont, Bishop of Paris. This 
property had come to the crown by purchase or by gift, 
and had been partly torn down, rebuilt, and its grounds 
greatly enlarged, to make a maison-de-plaisance for 
Charles VI. The principal building had so many and 
such various shaped towers and turrets that it was 
named the Palais des Tournelles. Viewed from a dis- 
tant height, as from the tower of Notre-Dame by 
Quasimodo, it had the look of a set of giant chessmen. 
This was the place selected by the Duke of Bedford for 
his residence during the English occupation of Paris; 
and from here, after the death of his brother Henry V. 
of England — and heir of France, as was then claimed 
—he reigned as Regent for the little Henry VI. He 



454 THE STONES OF PARIS 

enlarged the buildings and beautified the grounds, in 
which he kept many rare birds. He kept, too, the rare 
manuscripts brought together by Charles V. in the 
Louvre ; and after his death in Rouen — where he had 
helped burn The Maid — this library was carried to Eng- 
land, when the English departed from France. It was 
ransomed with coin, and brought back to Paris, by the 
two grandsons of its original owner — Charles of Or- 
leans, and his brother of Angouleme, and became the 
nucleus of the Royal, now the National Library. 

So, when the sentries in English uniforms had gone 
from the gates, and the archers in Lincoln green were 
seen no more in the streets, Charles VIL came back, 
made King of France by The Maid who had found him 
King of Bourges, and whom he let the English burn for 
her pains. He entered Paris in November, 1437, nearly 
twenty years after he had been carried out from the 
town in the arms of Tanneguy Duchatel. That quick- 
witted provost, discovering that the Burgundians had 
got into the town by the betrayed Porte de Buci, on the 
night of Saturday, May 28, 1418, had hastened to the 
Hotel Saint- Paul, had wrapped the sleeping boy in his 
bedclothes, and had carried him up Rue Saint-Antoine 
to the Bastille, and out into the country on the follow- 
ing day, and so to Melun, where the King's son was 
safe. 

During this first short stay of three weeks, the list- 
less and sluggish young King grew as fond as had 
been the Duke of Bedford of the walled-in grounds of 
the Tournelles. They were very extensive, covering 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 455 



the space bounded by present Rues Saint-Antoine, 
Saint-Gilles, Turenne, and Boulevard Beaumarchais. 
Within this vast enclosure were many buildings and 
outbuildings, and in the words of Sauval : ''Ce n'etoit 
que galeries et jardins de tons cotes, sans parler des 
chapelles/' 

And henceforth, for more than a hundred years, the 
Tournelles, '' pour la heaute et commodite du dit lieu," 
was the favored abode of royalty, when royalty favored 
Paris with infrequent visits. The sombre shapes of 
Louis XI. and his ignoble comrades darkened its pre- 
cincts, at times. When he made his entry, already nar- 
rated, into the town after his coronation at Rheims, he 
passed the night of August 31, 1461, in the old Island- 
Palace, and on the following day he installed himself 
in " son hotel des Tournelles, pres la Bastille de Saint- 
Antoine/' Here he received, in September, 1467, a visit 
from his second wife, Charlotte de Savoie, who came 
up the river from Rouen. She was met, below the Isl- 
and, by a boatful of choristers, who " sang psalms and 
anthems after a most heavenly and melodious manner." 
She landed on the Island, performed her devotions at 
Notre-Dame, and took boat to the water-gate of Quai 
des Celestins opposite, and thence made her way on a 
white palfrey to the Tournelles. The King's physician, 
Dr. Coictier — most skilled in bleeding, in all possible 
ways, his royal patient — had an astrological tower in 
the grounds, and in the centre was a maze named '' Le 
Jardin Daedalus." About these grounds Louis prowled, 
seldom going beyond them, and then only by night, and 



456 THE STONES OF PARIS 

with one trusted gossip. Indeed, he was less Uke the 
King of France here in his palace than anywhere else ; 
camping rather than residing, with a small retinue of 
old Brabant servitors, and a larder filled mostly with 
cold victuals, says Michelet. It was Loches occasion- 
ally, and Plessis-les-Tours habitually, that had the 
pleasure of harboring the '' universal spider " ; in them 
both he spun his webs, and waited gloating, and found 
" many cockroaches under the King's hearthstone," as 
the saying went. And at last he died, triumphant and 
wretched, at Plessis-les-Tours. 

'' Le Petit Roi," Charles VIIL, hardly knew Paris; 
and when he entered the town on February 8, 1492, 
with his young wife, Anne of Brittany, who had been 
crowned at Saint-Denis the day before, the populace 
was not agreeably impressed by his short stature, his 
bad figure, his heavy head, his big nose, his thick lips 
always open, and his great, blank, staring eyes. He was 
in curious contrast with the bride — pretty, sprightly, 
vivacious, and " very knowing," wrote home the Vene- 
tian Ambassador, Zaccaria Contarini. The gentle, 
weakly King — so strange a scion of Louis XL — made 
his home in Touraine. On the terrace of Amboise, 
where he was born, we all know the little door, leading 
to the old Haquelebac Gallery, against which he struck 
his head as he started down to look on a game of ten- 
nis. There, on April 7, 1498, in a sordid and filthy 
chamber, a remnant of the old chateau he was just then 
rebuilding, he lay for hours until his death, so carrying 
out the curse of Savonarola, who had threatened him 




Anne de Bretagne. 

(From a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.) 



[From a carbon prmt by Braun, Clement &r' Co.] 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 457 

with the anger of God, if he failed to return to Italy 
with his army to cleanse the unclean Church with the 
sword. 

** Le bon Roi Louis, Pere du Peiiple, est mort," is the 
doleful pronouncement of the crieurs du corps, start- 
ing out from the Tournelles before dawn of New Year's 
day, 1 5 15. The kindly old fellow has died in the night, 
a martyr to a young wife and to her fashionable hours. 
All his life long, Louis had been subject to the fancies 
of women, to his undoing. We meet him first, the 
young and ardent Due d'Orleans, the best horseman 
and swordsman in the court, riding out from Plessis 
with the brave Dunois — both grandsons, with different 
bars, of the murdered Louis d'Orleans — to snatch the 
girl Isabelle from the escort of Quentin Durward. The 
duke has already taken the eye of the capable Anne, 
eldest daughter of Louis XL, as Brantome is quick to 
note. Getting no return for her passion, the fury of a 
woman scorned, backed by her father's malign humor, 
marries the handsome prince to her younger sister, 
Jeanne — ugly and deformed and uncharming. Freed 
by divorce from this childless union, on taking the 
throne, Louis hastens to marry his former flame, Anne 
of Brittany, now the widow of Charles VIIL This 
lady, fair in person and fairer in her duchy, lively and 
not unlearned, a blameless yet imperious spouse, gave 
him many happy years. The personal court he allowed 
'' sa Bretomie" outshone his own court, and glorified 
the gloomy Tournelles. For all his clinging to her, she 
was taken from him when only thirty-seven years of 



4S8 THE STONES. OF PARIS 

age; refusing to live, when she found, for the first 
time, that her self-will was not allowed its own way. 
She would have her daughter, Claude, marry Charles 
of Austria, Emperor-to-be, and the powers in France 
would not have it, because they were unwilling that 
Brittany should go, with its heiress, into foreign hands. 
A marriage was arranged between Claude and the 
young Due d'Angouleme, who was to become Francois 
L, so keeping the rich duchy for France. After Anne's 
death, her widower made a third venture, and yet, the 
chronicler plaintively assures us, he had no need of a 
new wife. This was Mary, sister of Henry VIII. of 
England, who was glad to get her out of his country ; 
and she was as glad to return as soon as, on finding her- 
self a widow, she could become the wife of her first love, 
Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And so these two 
were the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey. 

Now the customary hour for dining in those days 
was from five to ten in the morning, changing a little 
with the seasons. A French " Poor Richard " of the 
period says : 

""Lever a cing, diner a neuf, 
Souper a cing, coucher a neuf ; 
Fait vivre d'ans nonnante et neuf.^^ 

Montaigne owns that his dinner-hour of eleven in the 
morning was unduly late, but then his supper came 
correspondingly late, never before, and often after, six 
of the evening. Henri IV. dined at the same belated 
hour, while Frangois I. could not wait later than nine 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 459 



o'clock. Once installed in the Tournelles, this young 
English bride of Louis's must needs, among other in- 
novations, introduce her own country's customs into 
her husband's mode of life, as we are told in " la tres 
joyeuse et plaisante histoire " of the " Loyal Serviteur," 
of Bayard : " His wife changed all his manner of liv- 
ing; he had been wont to dine at eight, and he now 
dined at mid-day ; he had been wont to go to bed at 
six in the evening, and he now went to bed at mid- 
night." Moreover, she beguiled him into supping late 
and heavily. So these changes, and other changes in 
his habits, brought him to his grave, six weeks after 
his marriage. His Parisians gathered in Rue Saint- 
Antoine, about the entrance of the Tournelles, in hon- 
est sorrow for the loss of the big and benevolent old 
boy, whom they looked on and loved as the Father of 
his People ; indeed '' one of the people," says Michelet, 
'* without the soul of a king." 

The Tournelles blazed out bravely for Francois L, 
the while the Hotel Saint-Paul found itself cut up and 
sold off in lots by him ; the two cases showing his way, 
all through life, of raising money by any means, squeez- 
ing his subjects, starting France's national debt as he 
did, all because of his puerile ambitions, his shallow 
levity, his selfish waste. He did his best to justify 
Louis XH.'s shrewd prophecy for him: " Ce grand 
gars-Id gat era tout." Recalling, one needy day, that 
he owned Saint-Paul, '' tin grand hotel, fort vague et 
ruineux," he soon got rid of the buildings and the land 
for coin, reserving one large tract, along the eastern 



46o THE STONES OF PARIS 

side under the wall, for the erection of an arsenal. 
And so, with streets cut through the old domain, no 
trace was left of Charles V.'s "" hotel solemiel des 
grands ehastements." As for the- Tournelles, its new 
master's fondness for all showy gimcrackery adorned 
it with furniture and fittings, and notably with the 
tapestries turned out so sumptuously from the factory 
at Tours, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, 
that they came into vogue for decoration, in place of 
wall-paintings. No need to say that the table at the 
Tournelles was profuse and its court resplendent. 
There had been few women in the court before now, 
and it was a garden without pretty flowers, as Bran- 
tome puts it. Anne of Brittany had brightened it a 
bit for Brantome with some few dames et demoiselles, 
but Frangois crowded it with fair women, who brought 
music and dancing and flirting. This big and brutal 
dilettante^study his face in the countless portraits 
in the Louvre and at Azay-le-Rideau — gave little 
of his time to the Tournelles, however. Setting Pierre 
Lescot at work on the lovely western wing of his new 
Louvre, he rushed over the land, building and beauti- 
fying at Saint-Germain, Compiegne, Fontainebleau, 
Blois, Chambord, posing always as the patron and 
prodrome of the Renaissance in France. At least, he 
could say truly of himself, " On verra qu'il y a un roi 
en France; " but besides the throne and his pet fool- 
ishnesses, he handed down nothing worth owning to 
his son — that Henri IL of heavy fist and light brain, 
slow of thought and of speech, cold, uncongenial, com- 




Louis XII. 

(Water color, from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.) 



[From a carbon print by Braun, Clement &" Co.] 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 461 



monplace. Yet the Tournelles was a cheerful home for 
him and for his official family, when he could get away 
from the exclusive holding of Diana of Poictiers and 
her family. His youngest daughter, Marguerite de 
France, has sketched, in her '' Memoires," a most 
winning picture of the place and of herself, a lovely 
maid of seven, playing about the garden or sitting on 
her father's knee, helping him select a suitor for her, 
from among the young swells at the court. That scene 
took place only a few days before his death. 

To the Tournelles comes Francois Rabelais, in the 
''Contes Drolatiques" of Balzac, and gives to King and 
court that delicious sermon, worthy of Rabelais himself. 
He has come along Rue Saint- Antoine from his home in 
Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, a rural lane then, just 
outside Philippe-Auguste's wall, on the extreme edge 
of the gardens of Saint-Paul. In that paved and built- 
up street of to-day none of us can fix on the site of 
his house, and the tablet, on its corner of Quai des 
Celestins, tells us only that Rabelais died in a house 
in this street on April 9, i553- Charles Nodier, start- 
ing out from his Librarian's rooms in the Arsenal 
Library, on his endless prowls about old Paris, always 
stopped and took off his hat in front of No. 8 of Rue 
des Jardins, in honor of the great French humorist. 
Ignorant of his reason for the selection of this site, 
we may be content, in imitation of this charming M- 
neur, to stand uncovered there, before or near the last 
dwelling of '' le savant et ingenieux rieur," whose birth- 
place and whose statue at Chinon are worth a journey 



462 THE STONES OF PARIS 

to see; where, too, the local wine will be found as 
delicate and as individual as when, sold by the elder 
Rabelais in the fourteenth century, it made the money 
that sent his famous son to the great schools of the 
capital. That son closed his life of congenial vaga- 
bondage, and of many metiers, in this sedate country 
road, where he had passed three blameless years, two 
of them as cure of Meudon, resigning that position in 
1552. He was buried in the cemetery of old Saint- 
Paul, to which we shall find our way later. Modern 
Paris has doubtless built itself over the grave, as it 
certainly has over the last dwelling-place, of the nar- 
rator of the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel 
and the creator of Panurge. 

The famous lists of the Tournelles extended along 
the southern edge of its grounds, just beyond the 
present northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, Rue de 
Birague being cut through almost their middle line. 
For more than a hundred years they had been the 
scene of many a tournament, and not one of them had 
been so crowded or so brilliant as that which began 
on June 28, 1559. The peace of Cateau-Cambresis, 
made in the previous April with England and Spain, 
was to be celebrated, and there were to be rejoicings 
over the recent marriage of Henry's sister. Marguerite, 
with the Due de Savoie, and of his eldest daughter, 
Isabelle, with Philip H. of Spain. This girlish third 
wife of the Spanish King was the heroine of the Don 
Carlos affair, which has made so many dramas. To 
rejoice in royal fashion in those days, men must needs 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 463 

fight and ladies must look on. So it came that the 
King, proud of having shown himself " a sturdy and 
skilful cavalier " during the two days' tilting, insisted 
on running a course with Montgomery of the Scottish 
Guard, whose broken lance pierced Henri's visor 
through the eye into the brain. He lay unconscious in 
the Tournelles for eleven days, and there he died on 
July 10, 1559. 

Those lists were never again used, the palace was 
never again inhabited. All the bravery of the two last 
courts could not hide the dry-rot of the wooden 
structures, and all its perfumes could not sweeten the 
stenches from the open drains all about. Even the 
hard-headed and strong-stomached Louise de Savoie, 
mother of Frangois L, had sickened in the place. So 
'' le miserable coup," that freed Catherine de' Medici 
from years of slighted wifehood, gave her an excuse 
for leaving the malodorous and unhealthful Tournelles, 
with her four sons and her unmarried daughter. A 
portion of the structures was kept by her second son, 
Charles IX., for his birds and dogs, until his mother 
got him to order its destruction by an edict dated Janu- 
ary, 1565. 

On his Pont-Neuf sits Henri IV. on his horse, and 
every Frenchman looks up as he passes, with almost 
the same emotion felt by the Frenchmen of Voltaire's 
day, at the effigy of the most essentially French of all 
French kings. The statue faces " the symmetrical 
structures of stone and brick," planned by him for his 
Place Dauphine, in honor of the birth of his son. They 



464 THE STONES OF PARIS 

are hardly altered since their construction by his good 
friend Achille de Harlay, President of Parliament, 
whose name is retained in the street behind the place 
and in front of the Palace of Justice. The King looks 
out, a genial grin between his big, ugly, Gascon-Bour- 
bon nose and his pushing chin, over his beloved Paris, 
well worth the mass he gave for it ; for, from the day 
he got control, it grew in form and comeHness for him. 
Plis kindly, quizzical eyes seem to see, over the Island 
and the river, his own old Marais, the quarter which 
held the hotel of his menus plaisirs, and which it was his 
greater pleasure to rebuild and make beautiful. And 
''la perle du Marais" — his Place Royale — deserves 
his unchanging regard, almost unchanged as it is, 
since he planned it and since its completion, which he 
never saw. It is the grand tangible monument he has 
left to Paris, and speaks of him as does nothing else 
in the town. 

When he came into his capital on March 22, 1594, 
he found the enclosure of the Tournelles en friche. 
Within a few days he gave a piece of it, holding an 
old house, that fronted on Rue Saint-Antoine, to his 
good Rosny, whom he made Due de Sully a little later. 
This Maximilien de Bethune had been the most faith- 
ful helper of Henri de Navarre and he continued to be 
the most faithful servant of Henri IV. He had many 
homely virtues, rare in those days, rare in any days. 
He was courageous, honest, laborious ; he did long and 
loyal service to the State ; he worked almost a miracle 
for the finances of the kingdom, carrying his economies 




Sully. 

(From a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musee Conde at Chantilly.) 



{From a carbon print by Braun, Clement &= Co.] 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 465 

into every detail, even to the ordering of costumes in 
black, to spare the expense of the richly colored robes in 
vogue. A vigilant watch-dog, he was surly and snap- 
pish withal, and he had a greedy grip on all stray bones 
that fell fairly in his way. His wealth and power grew 
with his chances. He seems to have put something of 
himself into his hotel, which faces us at No. 143 Rue 
Saint- Antoine. It bears on its lordly front an honesty 
of intention that is almost haughty, with a certain self- 
sufficiency that shows a lack of humor ; all most char- 
acteristic of the man. Neither he nor his abode ap- 
peals to our affections, howsoever they may compel our 
respect. 

Having got this well-earned gift of land from the 
King, he cleared away the old buildings upon it, and 
erected this superb structure. His architect was doubt- 
less Jean Du Cerceau, for the heaviness of his early work 
is apparent in these walls, but their owner evidently en- 
forced his personal tastes on them. The fagade, on the 
shapely court, has its own touch of distinction, dashed 
by the touch of pomposity that dictated, to the four 
secretaries employed on his memoirs, his stock phrase, 
" Such was Sully ! " This front is over-elaborate. The 
main body and the two wings — which are a trifle too 
long and too large, and so crowd and choke that main 
body — are all heavily sculptured. On every side, stone 
genii bear arms, stone women pose as the seasons and 
the elements, stone masks and foliage, whose carving 
is finer than the sculpture, crowd about the richly chis- 
elled windows. Yet those windows look down on the 



466 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



court in a most commanding way; and the fabric, be- 
hind all its floridness, shows a power in the rectitude of 
its lines that must needs be acknowledged. 
The garish windows of the restaurant on the ground 




The Court of the Hotel de Bethune. Sully's Residence. 

floor glare intrusively out on the old-time court, and a 
discordant note is struck by the signs, all about its 
doorways, of the new-fangled industries within — a 
water-cure, a boxing-school, a gymnasium. School- 
boys play noisily in this court, and, in the garden be- 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 467 



hind, schoolgirls take the air demurely. To reach their 
garden, we pass through a spacious hall, along one side 
of which mounts a wide, substantial staircase, its ceil- 
ing overloaded with panels and mouldings. Set in a 
niche in the garden-wall is a bust of the Duke of Sully. 
This garden fagade is in severer taste than that of the 
front court, its wings are less obtrusive, and its whole 
effect is admirable. The little garden once made one 
with the garden of the Hotel de Chaulnes behind, that 
faced the Place Royale, to which Sully thus had en- 
trance. That entrance may be found through the 
two small doors of No. 7, Place des Vosges, and be- 
hind that building is Sully's orangerie, in perfect preser- 
vation. 

Having handsomely requited his servant and com- 
rade, the King began, in the very centre of the Tour- 
nelles, a great square with surrounding structures. 
As soon as one of his pavilions was sufficiently finished, 
he installed in it a colony of two hundred Italians, 
brought to France for that purpose, skilled weavers 
and workers of silks shot with silver and with gold, 
such as made Milan famous. And to this man alone 
— who was, said a memorial of his Chamber of Com- 
merce, pleading for the planting of the mulberry, 
** nearly divine, never promising without performing, 
never starting without finishing;" and who issued 
edicts for that planting, in spite of Sully's opposition 
— does France owe her mulberry plantations and her 
silkworms, as Voltaire truly points out. It is com- 
monly asserted that his " mason," for these con- 



468 THE STONES OF PARIS 

structions of the Place Royale, was Androuet Du 
Cerceau, whose name is claimed for many buildings 
that would make his working-life last for a century 
and more. This Jacques Androuet was so renowned 
in his day, that much of the architecture of his sons 
and his grandson was then, and is still, set down 
to him. That stern old Huguenot, born in 15 15, went 
from Paris along with the dwellers in '* Little Geneva," 
and is last heard of, still in exile, as late as 1584. Per- 
haps his son Baptiste joined him in 1585, when his 
convictions drove him, too, from the court and the 
capital, as has been told in the chapter, " The Scholars' 
Quarter." Baptiste came back to serve Henri IV. and 
Louis XHL, and trained his son Jean in his trade. 
For much of the work of this busy Jean his grand- 
father has the credit, as well as for other work done 
by Jean's uncle Jacques, second of that name. The 
Pont-Neuf is always ascribed to the great Androuet, 
who never saw one of its stones in place. That bridge 
was begun by his son Baptiste in 1578, and finished 
by his grandson Jean in 1607. He it was, if it were 
any Du Cerceau, who planned and began the Place 
Royale. 

We are fortunate in that we may see one example 
of the style of the founder of this notable family, in 
the massive structure at No. 212 Rue Saint- Antoine, 
its side walls extending along Rue du Petit-Musc. 
This street took its title from one of the numerous 
small hotels that made up the grand Hotel Saint-Paul ; 
and on its foundations — still buried beneath these 




'" J.^llMji^- 



The Hotel de Mayenne. 

In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marle, called the Church of the Visitation. 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 469 

stones — was erected the present structure by An- 
drouet Du Cerceau. It is the only entire specimen 
of his work in Paris, and we may beheve that he had 
done better work than this, albeit it carries the au- 
thority of the old Huguenot. He began it for Diane 
de Poictiers, and it was finished for an owner as heavy 
and as stolid as its walls. This was Charles de Lor- 
raine, Due de Mayenne, the eldest, the least brilliant, 
the most honest, of the famous brothers of Guise. As 
Lieutenant-General of the League, he led its troops to 
the defeats of Arques and Ivry. When Henri de Na- 
varre became Henri IV. of France, the only punishment 
he inflicted on his fat opponent was to walk him, at a 
killing pace, about the grounds of Monceaux, while lis- 
tening to his protests of future submission : '' I will 
be to you, all my life long, a loyal subject and faithful 
servant. I will never fail you nor desert you." So 
promised Mayenne, and he kept his word. He lived 
here in this mansion, through sixteen years of honorable 
employment in the Council of State, surviving Henry 
only a few months, and dying in his bed, in pain and 
with patience. His house, once one of the noisy hatch- 
ing-places of the Holy League, is now a noisy school 
for boys. Its well-set cornice has been mangled by 
the cutting through it of the dormer windows, its grand 
staircase has been degraded, its court, stern from Du 
Cerceau's hand, has grown sullen, and its great gar- 
dens are built over, all along Rue du Petit-Musc. 

In accordance with the King's scheme for his Place 
Royale, its eastern side was first built up at the crown's 



470 THE STONES OF PARIS 

expense. The other sides were divided into lots of 
similar size, and leased to men of the court, of family, 
and of finance, on condition that they should begin to 
build at once, each after the original plans. With this 
stipulation, and an agreement to occupy their dwell- 
ings when finished, and to pay a yearly rental of one 
crown of gold, they and their heirs forever were given 
possession of these lots, as stated in the royal patent 
registered on August 5, 1605. Thirty-six structures 
were planned for these private dwellings, the two cen- 
tral pavilions on the northern and southern sides being 
reserved for royalty ; so that thirty-six crowns were 
to come in as the entire annual revenue from the Place 
Royale ; not an exorbitant rental, since the ecu de la 
couronne of that day was worth from seven to ten 
francs. Thus began that historic square, and thus 
vanished, from off the face of the earth, the last trace 
of the historic Tournelles. 

Henry was more eager to hurry on the construc- 
tions than were his tenants ; only a few of whom, 
indeed, completed and occupied their houses. There 
w^ere other delays in building, not to be overcome by 
his almost daily visits to the spot when in town, and by 
his appealing letters from Fontainebleau to Sully, urg- 
ing him to " go and see " if the work were being pushed 
on. But it was still unfinished, when Ravaillac's knife 
cut off all his plans. This plan, however, was carried 
out by Marie de' Medici, who had made herself Queen- 
Regent by lavish payments and promises. Her mem- 
ories of the style of Northern Italy influenced details 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 471 

of the new constructions, which were so far finished 
in 161 5 as to serve for the scene of the festivities, 
planned by her as an expression of the joy that the 
Parisians did not know they felt. The occasion was 
the marriage of her son, the fourteen-year-old Louis 
XIII., with Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip 
III. of Spain ; and of her daughter, Isabelle, with the 
Spanish Infante, afterward Philip IV. That was a 
great day for the Place Royale. For this function its 
still uncompleted portions were hid by scaffoldings, and 
all its fronts were draped with hangings and festooned 
with flowers. One hundred thousand guests swarmed 
to see the childish mummery of bearded men pranking 
as nymphs, the circus antics of ballets de chevaux by 
day, and the fireworks by night. 

This first public appearance of the place was, also, 
the last public appearance of the Queen-Regent. There 
can be woven no romance about this woman ; fat and 
foolish, copious of emotion, impulsive of speech. The 
pencil of Rubens cannot give grace to her affluent 
curves, and her husband's strength could not stand 
against her '* terribly robust " arms, working briskly 
when she raged. Whatever may be our summing-up 
of this man's morality, we must set down, to the credit 
of his account, his hard case with the two women to 
whom fate had married him, each so trying after her 
own fashion. Of sterner stuff than he, so far as that 
sex goes, was Richelieu, the new ruler of the young 
King Louis XIII. He would bear no more of Marie's 
meddling and muddling, and sent her into exile in 



472 THE S TO. YES OF PARIS 

1617. These two died in the same year, 1642, she in 
poverty and neglect at Cologne, after having so long 
been " tossed to and fro by the various fortunes of her 
life," says English Evelyn ; who, travelling on the Con- 
tinent, notes the " universal discontent which accom- 
panied that unlucky woman, wherever she went." 

We see her in our Place Royale only during this 
one day, but her son and his minister are with us there 
to-day, as we stand in front of that King's statue, in 
the centre of the square. This statue is a reproduc- 
tion of the original — melted down in 1792 — erected 
by Richelieu in 1639, not less for his own glorification, 
than to immortalize the virtues of " Louis the Just, 
Thirteenth of that name." He had a score of the virtues 
of a valet, indeed, and with them the soul of a lackey. 
This present statue, placed here in the closing year 
of the Bourbon Restoration, 1829, prettifies and makes 
complacent that sombre and suspicious creature, the 
dismallest figure in his low-spiri,ted court. On his 
hair, flowing to his shoulders, rests a laurel crown, and 
the weak lips, curved in an unwonted smile, not twisted 
by his habitual stutter, are half hid by a darling 
mustache. He sits his horse jauntily, clad in a long 
cloak and a skirt reaching to his naked knees, and 
tries to be ostentatiously Roman with bare arms and 
legs, his right hand pointing out across the square, 
from which he tried in vain to drive the duellists. 

We have already come here, under the guidance of 
Dumas, to witness one famous duel in the time of 
Henri HI. This spot had retained its vogue for the 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 473 

aristocratic pastime, in spite of the repeated edicts and 
the relentless punishments of Richelieu, under royal 
sanction and signature. Fair women hung over the in- 
frequent balconies, or peeped from the windows, to view 
these duels and to applaud the duellists. A keener 
interest was given to the probability of the death on 
the ground of one combatant, by the certainty of the 
axe or the rope of the public executioner for the sur- 
vivor. 

Windows and balconies are deserted now ; there is 
no clash of steel in the square, whose silence is in strik- 
ing contrast with the sordid strife of neighboring Rue 
Saint- Antoine ; and these stately mansions, dignified 
in their unimpaired old age, seem to await in patience 
the return of their noble occupants. There has been no 
change in them since, on their completion in 1630, they 
were regarded as the grandest in all Paris, and there 
is hardly any change in their surroundings. The com- 
monplace iron railings of the square, put there at the 
same time with the fountains, by Louis-Philippe, were 
the cause of hot protest by Hugo and other residents of 
the quarter, who mourned the loss of the artistic rails 
and gateway of seventeenth-century fabrication. And 
Rue des Vosges has been cut through into the north- 
ern side of the square, making a thoroughfare to Boule- 
vard Beaumarchais, such as was not planned originally. 
That plan provided for approach to the place only by 
the two streets under the two central pavilions, north 
and south, now named Beam and Birague. Those 
two pavilions, higher than the others, were set apart 



474 THE STONES OF PARIS 

for the King and Queen; and over the central win- 
dow of the southern one, the King, in medallion, looks 
down. The stately fronts of red brick — new to Paris 
then — edged with light freestone, and the steep roofs 
of leaded blue slate, broken by great dormers rem- 
iniscent of Renaissance windows, are time-stained 
to a delicate tricolor; and it pleases us to fancy the 
first Bourbon King unconsciously anticipating the flag 
of the French Republic in the colors of his Place 
Royal e. 

These tall windows, opening from floor to ceiling, 
were a novelty to the Parisians of that day, the fashion 
having only just then been set in the new Hotel Ram- 
bouillet. Behind them, the spacious blue and yellow 
salons were hung with Italian velvets, or with Flemish 
and French tapestries, interspaced with Venetian mir- 
rors. Lebrun and his like decorated the ceilings later, 
and the cornices were heavily carved, and the furni- 
ture was in keeping with its surroundings. The 
arcades of brick, picked out with stone ribs — a trifle 
too low^ and heavy, it may be, for their symmetry with 
the otherwise perfect proportions of these facades — 
were imitated from those of Italy, to serve for shelter 
from sun, and for refuge from rain, to the strollers who 
thronged them for over a century. To tell over their 
names, one has merely to look down the list of the men 
who made themselves talked about, through the whole 
of Louis XIII. 's and almost to the close of Louis 
XIV.'s reign. Then there were the women, lovely or 
witty or wicked, and those others, "" enh'e deux ages," 



THE MAKING OF THE MAR A IS 4^3 



for whom the Marais was noted. The creations of 
comedy are here, too, and MoHere's Mascarille and 
le Menteur of Corneille are as aUve as their creators, 
under these arcades. 

For this spot was not only the centre of the supreme 
social movement of the capital during this long period, 
but it was the cradle of that bourgeois existence which 
grew absurd in its swelling resolve to grow as big as 
that above it. The Hotel Rambouillet, for all its 
affectations, did some slight service to good literature 
and good morals; it rated brains and manners above 
rank and money; it paid a formal and skin-deep homage 
to decency. MoHere himself, rebelling, had to yield, 
and his early license became restraint, at least. In 
the wild days of the Fronde, men and women were 
in earnest, and then came the days when they were in 
earnest only about trifles ; when the *' infinitely little " 
was of supremest importance, when shallow refine- 
ments concealed coarseness, stilted politeness covered 
mutual contempt, and the finest sentiments of a Joseph 
Surface in the salon went along with unrestricted 
looseness outside. To seem clean was the epidemic of 
the time, and its chronic malady was cant, pretence, 
and pollution. And the hourgeois imitated the noble ; 
and, in the Place Royale and about, Moliere found his 
Precieuses Ridicules. Just a little way from here, was 
a room full of them — that of Mile, de Scudery. 

Go up Rue de Beauce, narrowest of Marais streets 
between its old house- and garden-walls, and you come 
to the passage that leads to the Marche des Enfants- 



476 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Rouges, the market and its surrounding space taking 
the greater part of the site, and keeping aHve the 
name, of the admirable charity for children originated 
by the good Marguerite de Navarre, sister of Frangois 
I., and by him endowed at her urging. The little 
orphans cared for in this institution were clad all in 
red, and their pet popular name of " Enfants Rouges " 
soon took the place of the official title of ''Enfants de 
Dieu." On the corner of this passage, you must stop 
to choose the abode of Mile, de Scudery from one of 
the two ancient houses there, for it is certain that she 
lived in one of these two, with a side door in the pas- 
sage; and local legend and topographic research have 
failed to fix on the true one. She has told us that it 
stood alongside the Templars' grounds, in the midst 
of gardens and orchards tuneful with birds, so that the 
lower end of the street was called Rue des Oiseaux; 
and we find this narrow passage, since then close shut 
in with houses, still tuneful to-day, but the birds are 
kept in cages. 

In this house Madeleine de Scudery wrote her long 
and weary romance, " Artamene, ou le Grand Cyrus," 
the most widely read and the most successful book of 
the day, from the money point of view. With this 
money she paid the debts of her brother, Georges, a 
dashing spendthrift with showy tastes; one of those 
chivalric souls, too fine tO' work, but not too fine to 
sponge on his sister and to take pay for, and put his 
name to, work done by her pen. Here she carried on 
the old business of the Hotel Rambouillet, where she 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 477 



had served her apprenticeship before starting out for 
herself, and where she had produced the poem by 
which she won her nom de P amass e, '' Sapho." Here 
she was promoted to be the Tenth Muse, and sat en- 
throned amid her admirers, who trooped in from all 
about the Marais, on every Saturday for more than 
thirty years. As to the causerie litteraire et galante of 
these reunions, we learn all about it, and laugh at it, 
in Pellisson's '' Chronique du Samedi." It is impos- 
sible to burlesque it ; Moliere himself could not do it. 
He has taken entire sentences concerning the educa- 
tion of woman from the " Grand Cyrus," and put them 
into his '' Femmes Savantes " ; and it is simply a por- 
trait that he drew of Madelon, as she sat in this salon 
a year or so before he put her on the stage, awaiting 
the gifted authors of " La Carte du Royaume des Pre- 
tieuses." And Mascarille's fatuous swagger and stri- 
dent voice — as he walks the boards in Coquelin's skin 
— seem to come straight and uncaricatured from Pellis- 
son's pages. When the valet's voice, quavering with 
complacency, shakes our midriff with his pronounce- 
ment : " We attach ourselves only to madrigals," he is 
making a direct quotation from the " Chronique." 

Mile, de Scudery, while a precieuse herself, was too 
genuine and talented and good-hearted a woman to 
be ridiculous. She is really an admirable example of 
the writing-woman of the seventeenth century, a fe- 
male Mignard in her pen-portraits. Dr. Martin Lister 
came to pay his respects to the Tenth Muse, in this 
little house in 1698, and found her over ninety years 



47S THE STONES OF PARIS 

old, toothless, and still talking! One might wish to 
have been present at this meeting, but may be content 
with looking on the walls that harbored a worthy 
woman and her queer crowd of adorers. 

They came from all about the Marais, it has been 
said. At the time of her death, in the first year of the 
eighteenth century, this quarter had become the chosen 
abode of the real swells of Paris, and so the only pos- 
sible residence for all those who wished to be so con- 
sidered. Long before, a new member of the body poli- 
tic had been born — the bourgeois — and a place had 
to be found for him. The leisure he had gained from 
bread-getting need no longer be given to head-break- 
ing, and for his vision there was a horizon broader 
than that of his father, of dignity in man and comeli- 
ness in life. His first solicitude was for his habitation, 
which must be set free from the rude strength of the 
feudal fortresses in which the noblesse had camped. 
He levelled battlements into cornices, and widened 
loop-holes into windows, open for sunlight and a la 
belle etoile. In this seemly home, his thoughts threw 
off the obstruction imposed by centuries of repression, 
and by the joyless dogmas of the Church. And so 
began that multiform process that, at last, flamed up 
through the frozen earth, and has been named the Re- 
naissance. 

Many of the new mansions of the bourgeoisie were 
in Marais streets that were still walled of¥ by the shut- 
in grounds of the religious bodies, whose unproductive 
dwellers avoided all taxation. '' You see, formerly, 



THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS 479 



there were monasteries all about here," says hght- 
hearted Laigle in " Les Miserables " ; " Du Breul and 
Sauval give the list of them and the Abbe Lebeuf. 
They were all around here ; they swarmed ; the shod, 
the unshod, the shaven, the bearded, the blacks, the 
grays, the whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the 
Capuchins, the Carmelites, the Lesser Augustins, the 
Greater Augustins, the Old Augustins. They littered." 
These belated owls, blinking in the new sunlight and 
fresher air, had now to find other dark walls for their 
flapping. The zone of abbeys, stretching from the 
Bastille to the Louvre, began to be cut into, and the 
grounds of the great hotels of the noblemen came into 
the market as well. There had been hardly any open- 
ing-up of this quarter, from the day when Charles V. 
ended his wall, to the day when Henri IV. began his 
Place Royale. He had planned, also, a monumental 
square at the top of the Templars' domain, to be called 
Place de France, with a grandiose entrance, from 
which eight wide streets, bearing the names of the great 
provinces of France, were to radiate, to be crossed by 
smaller streets named from the lesser provinces. For 
this scheme Sully had bought up, under cover of a 
broker^ an immense tract in this region, just as the 
King's death put a sudden end to this project, along 
with all his other projects. 

One man did much to make real the plan that had 
been put on paper only. This was Claude Chariot, a 
Languedoc peasant, who had come to the capital in 
wooden sabots, with no money, but with plenty of 



48o THE STONES OF PARIS 

shrewdness and audacity. By 1618 he had managed 
to acquire almost the entire tract set aside by Sully, 
and through it he cut streets, the principal one of which 
is called after him, while, of those called after the 
provinces, some still keep their names and some have 
been renamed. 

Even during his mapmaking of the Marais — sum- 
marily stopped by Richelieu's spoliation — this was yet 
a solitary and unsafe quarter, through which its hon- 
est citizens went armed against footpads by day, and 
by night stretched chains across the coupe-gorges of 
its narrow streets. It continued to grow slowly 
through the last years of the seventeenth century, and 
these streets, with the Place Royale as their centre, were 
in time lined by the portes-cocheres of rich financiers, 
farmers-generals, and receivers of taxes, all swollen 
with their pickings and stealings. They adorned their 
dwellings with carved panels and painted ceilings, with 
sculptured halls and spacious stone stairways ; and 
many of them were rich in manuscripts and rare books, 
and in collections of various sorts. 

Of these mansions, a surprising proportion is still 
standing, given up to business-houses, factories, and 
schools; for all of which uses their capacious rooms 
readily lend themselves. Within these old walls, face 
to face with the bustling streets, shouldered by struct- 
ures of yesterday, or in dignified withdrawal behind 
their courts, can be found actual treasures of decoration 
and of carving, along with invisible and intangible 
treasures of association. For the aspect of a street, or 



THE MAKING OF THE MARA IS 



the atmosphere of a house, tells to the intelligent looker- 
on as much of its bygone inmates as of its bare ma- 
sonry. And kindly fate has left such relics plentifully 
scattered about the Marais. In oldest Paris of the 
Island, and in that almost as old suburb on the southern 
bank, one must prowl patiently to find suggestive brick 
and stone. In those regions a concealed tower, or an 
isolated tourelle on the angle of a building, makes the 
whole joy of a day's journey. Here, in the Marais, at 
every step you stumble on history and tradition and 
romance. 

For " the little province of the Marais " was far 
away from the capital, and was let alone ; or, rather, 
it was an unmolested island, washed about and not 
washed over by the swift tide of traffic. The stormy 
waves of insurrection have broken against its shores, 
and its pavements have never been made into barri- 
cades in any of the recurring revolutions, which have 
all been but interludes and later acts of the Great Revo- 
lution, in the people's endeavor to carry on and com- 
plete the main motive of that drama. 

The vogue of the Marais began to fade away with 
the middle years of the eighteenth century, when the 
old noblesse de famille adopted the Faubourg Saint- 
Germain, and the new noblesse de finance migrated to 
the Faubourg Saint-Honore, and the gadding multi- 
tude sought the arcades of the Palais-Cardinal, re- 
named Palais-Royal. A few ancient families, poor and 
proud, remained to burrow in their ancestral homes, 
and retired pensioned officials and petits rentiers found 



482 THE STONES OF PARIS 

a boon in the small rentals of the big apartments. All 
these locataires, preserving the old forms and keeping 
untarnished the old etiquette, gave an air of dignified 
dulness to the Marais. Their dinner-hour was at five 
o'clock, and after that solemn function, held in the hall 
hung with family portraits or with dingy tapestry, 
their sedate prattle, before going to bed at nine o'clock, 
would touch on the unhallowed Edict of Nantes and 
on its righteous revocation; even as in a certain Lon- 
don club of to-day, musty old gentlemen still lament, 
with subdued dismay, " the murder of the Martyr, 
Charles Stuart." The sole diversion of these ancient 
dames of the Marais was a stroll in the Place Royale, 
arrayed in old-time costumes, their white hair dressed 
high above their patrician brows. 

Nowadays, under the horse-chestnuts and baby elms 
of its ground, school-boys from the neighboring insti- 
tutions romp on the grit, and babies are wheeled about 
by their nurses, and on the benches sit faded old men, 
blinking and inarticulate. They cling to the historic 
name of the place, while to us of the real world it is 
known as Place des Vosges ; this title having been given 
it, in honor of the province of that name, by Lucien 
Bonaparte, while he was Minister of the Interior. The 
appellation was officially adopted by the Republic of 
1848, and once more, perhaps finally and for all time, 
by the Third Republic. 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 



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THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 

" Dajts cet hotel est nee, le 6 Fevrier, 1626, Marie de 
Rahutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sevigne: " so reads the 
tablet set in that wall, which fronts on the square, of 
the house numbered i Place des Vosges, having its en- 
trance at No. II Rue de Birague. There is no name 
more closely linked with the Marais than that of this 
illustrious woman. Born in this house, baptized in its 
parish church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, she here 
grew up to girlhood ; she was married in Saint-Ger- 
vais, her daughter was married in Saint-Nicolas-des- 
Champs ; and the greater portion of her life was passed 
within this quarter. Her father was killed in a duel a 
few months after her birth, at the age of seven she lost 
her mother, and when only twenty-five years old, she 
found herself a widow. After a short sojourn in the 
provinces with her son and daughter, she came back, 
in 1655, to Paris and to the Marais. She had casual 
and unsettled domiciles, for many years, in Rues de 
Thorigny, Barbette, des Francs-Bourgeois, des Lions- 
Saint-Paul, des Tournelles — all within our chosen dis- 
trict — before she settled in her home of twenty years, 
the Carnavalet. 

It is but a step away from this tablet above us, to 

485 



486 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the corner of Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and Sevigne; 
the latter street, at that time, bearing its original 
name of Culture-Sainte-Catherine, having been opened 
through that portion under cultivation of the grounds 
of the great monastery of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des- 
Ecoliers. On the corner of this new street and that of 
Francs-Bourgeois — then Rue Neuve- Sainte-Catherine 
— a piece of the convent garden was bought by Jacques 
de Ligneris, and thereon a house for his residence was 
erected. Its plans were drawn by Pierre Lescot, it 
was built by Jean Bullant, was decorated by Androuet 
Du Cerceau, and its sculptures were carved by Jean 
Goujon. And thus these walls, on which we are look- 
ing, speak in mute laudation of four famous men. One 
more notable name may be added to this list — that of 
Fran<;ois Mansart. He was called in, a century or so 
after the completion of this mansion, for its renovation 
and enlargement; and, to his lasting honor, he con- 
tented himself with doing only what seemed to him to 
be imperatively demanded, and with attempting no 
*' improvements " nor '' restoration " of the work of 
his great predecessors. He knew what we have learned, 
that those words too often mean desecration and ruin 
to all historic monuments in all lands. During this 
interval, the building had come into the hands of Fran- 
Qoise de la Baume, Dame de Kernevalec, whose Breton 
name, corrupted to Carnavalet, has clung to it ever 
since. That name suggested the pun of the carnaval 
masks, carved in stone over the arches of the wings in 
the court. They were done by a later hand than that of 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 487 



Goujon, whose last work is to be seen about that win- 
dow of the Louvre, on which he was busy, when a 
bullet picked him off, a day or two after the night 
of Saint Bartholomew. The tranquil elegance of his 
chisel has adorned this almost perfect gateway with the 
graceful winged figure in its keystone. It lifts and 
lightens the severe dignity of the facade. And, in the 
court — its centre not unworthily held by the bronze 
statue of Louis XIV., remarkable in its exquisite de- 
tails, found in the old Hotel de Ville — we linger in joy 
before the graceful flowing curves and the daylight 
directness of the Seasons of this French Phidias. The 
figures on the wings are from a feebler chisel than his. 
Of all the crowding memories of this spot, those of the 
Marquise de Sevigne and of Jean Goujon are the most 
vivid and the most captivating. The busts of these two, 
one on either side, greet us at the head of the staircase 
leading to her apartments ; she is alert and winsome, 
he is sedate and thoughtful and a trifle too stern for the 
most amiable of sculptors, as he shows himself here, 
rather than the staunch Huguenot, killed for his con- 
victions. 

She was fifty-one years of age by the records when 
she came to live here, in 1677, and half that age at heart, 
which she kept always young. She had been so long 
camping about in the Marais, that she was impatient to 
settle down in the ideal dwelling she had found, at last. 
She writes to her daughter : " Dieu merci, nous avons 
V hotel Carnavalet. C'est tine affaire admirable ; nous 
y tiendrons tous, et nous aurons le hel air. Comme on 



488 THE STONES OF PARIS 

ne pent pas tout avoir, il faut se passer des parquets, 
et des petites cheminees a la mode. . . . Pour moi, 
je vais vous ranger la Carnavalette, car, eniin, nous 
ravons, et fen suis fort aise." 

So she moved in, with her son and daughter, both 
dear to her. It was to the daughter, however, that the 
mother's affluence of affection flowed out, all through 
her life ; and it may well be that this veritable passion 
saved her from all other passions, during the years of 
her long widowhood, when many a grand parti fell at 
her feet. She looked on them all alike, with pity for 
their seizure, and each of them got up and walked away, 
unappeased. Yet hers was a rich nature, wholesome 
and womanly withal, and there are potentialities of 
emotion in the pouting lips and inviting eyes of the 
pretty pagan of this bust. Nor was she a prude, and 
her way of quoting Rabelais and listening to La Fon- 
taine's verses would horrify us moderns of queasy 
stomachs. She had ready pardon for the infidelities 
of her husband, and later for the misdeeds of her 
scampish cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, " the most dangerous 
tongue in France." 

Above all, this real woman showed a masculine 
strength and loyalty of friendship for men ; showed it 
most markedly in her sympathy for those who had fallen 
in the world. There is no finer example in the annals 
of constancy than her devotion to the broken Fouquet, 
howbeit he may have merited breaking. The spirit of 
her letters, at the time of his disgrace and imprison- 
ment, cannot be twisted into anything ignoble, as Na- 




Madame de Sevigne. 

(From the portrait by Mignard.) 



[From a carbon print by Braun, Clement Of Co.} 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 489 

poleon tried to do, on reading them in the State archives. 
He sneeringly suggested that her sympathy with Fou- 
quet was '' Men chaud, hien vif, bien tendre, pour de la 
simple amitie." So it was, indeed; for her friend- 
ships were attachments, and warmth and tenderness 
pulsate in all her letters ; and these qualities will, along 
with their unpremeditated spontaneity, keep them alive 
as long as letters Hve. What else was in her letters 
has been told by Nodier, when he says that they regu- 
lated and purified the language for ordinary use ; and 
by Jules Janin, who rightly claims that, from this Car- 
navalet, came the purest and most perfect French 
hitherto heard in France. 

In forming and housing the great collection of the 
History of Paris, to which the Musee Carnavalet is de- 
voted, new buildings about a trim garden in the rear 
have been added to the original mansion, whose own 
rooms have been subjected to as little change as pos- 
sible. Madame de Sevigne's apartment, on the first 
floor, is hardly altered, and her bedroom and salon have 
been especially kept inviolate. The admirable mould- 
ings, the curious mirrors, the old-fashioned lustre, re- 
main as she left them, when she went to her daughter 
at Grignan to die. In this salon, and in the wide cor- 
ridor leading to it, both now so silent and pensive, she 
received all the men of her day worth receiving; and 
it is here alone that we breathe the very atmosphere of 
this incomparable creature. 

We may join the early-goers among these men, who 
jnake their way to another house, not far distant. There 



490 THE STONES OP PARIS 



are temptations to stop before, and explore within, the 
seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues Sevigne 
and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne 
— once Rue Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and 
foremost in fashion of Marais streets, now merely big 
and bustling, with little left of its ancient glory — until 
we come to its No. 58, on the corner of old Rue des 
Douze-Portes, now named Ville-Hardouin, after the 
contemporary chronicler of the Fifth Crusade. This 
modest house at the corner has been luckily overlooked 
by the modern rebuilder of this quarter, who has not 
touched its two stories and low attic above a ground 
floor, its unobtrusive portal, its narrow hall, and its 
staircase ; small and quaint, in keeping with the cripple 
who was carried up and down for many years. Paul 
Scarron lived here, in the apartment avi deuzieme a 
droite, dubbed the "" Hotel de I'Impecuniosite " by his 
young wife, who was the granddaughter of the Cal- 
vinist leader, Agrippa d'Aubigne, and who was to be 
the second wife of Louis XIV. Sitting at her scantily 
supplied supper-table here, the maid would whisper 
that a course was lacking, and that an anecdote from 
the hostess must fill the bill of fare instead. Gold- 
smith tells us, at the beginning of his " Retaliation: " 

" Of old when Scarron his companions invited, 
Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united." 

And, just here, it is curious to recall the fact that Gold- 
smith was busied, during the last months of his life, 
on a translation of Scarron'? " Roman Comique," and 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA IS 491 

his bethumbed copy was found on his desk, after his 
death. 

Scarron was always poor and always importunate, 
and yet he was '' a pleasant prodigy never before seen," 
he says of himself ; rightfully claiming that he was able 
*' to sport with misery and jest in pain." Paralyzed 
and still a prey to incurable torments, immovable In 
his armchair except for his nimble fingers, he drove his 
pen merrily to the making of comedies, tales, pamphlets, 
and the verse that, like him, was impishly awry with 
mockery, as if chattered by " a wilderness of monkeys." 
Letters, too, he wrote in this house, that give us strik- 
ing glimpses of the man and of his time. In them we 
discover that " most terribly " was the sanctified slang 
then for the modern abomination " awfully." Appeals 
for money make up much of his correspondence, but 
there is never a hint of a loan in the charming letters 
to the *' helle ange en deuil," Madame de Sevigne ; in 
which he always assures her that she is a dangerous 
person, and that those who look on her without due 
care, grow sick upon it immediately, and are not long- 
lived. Mile, de Lenclos was a favorite of his, too, and 
that " charmant ohjet, helle Ninon," came to sit for 
hours beside his invalid-chair. She made friends with 
the young wife, too, but complained that she was 
" trop gauche " to learn gallantry, and was " vertiieuse 
par faiblesse." The large-minded lady frankly owns : 
" Taurais voulu I' en guerir, mats elle craignait trop 
Dieu." For all that, the friendship then formed be- 
tween the two women was never broken, and when the 



492 THE STONES OF PARIS 

widow Scarron came to position and power she of- 
fered a place at court to her elder friend ; an offer that 
was refused, for the old lady never grew old enough 
to change her mode of life. And there is little doubt 
that the younger woman often looked back with long- 
ing to those wretched days that were so happy. She 
said once, seeing the carp dying of surfeit in the Ver- 
sailles pond: " Elles regrettent leur boitrbe/' suggest- 
ing that, like them, she suffered from satiety. 

Years before his marriage, Scarron had lived with 
his sister in this same little street of " Twelve Doors," 
and had grown very fond of the " beau quartier des 
Marests." He asks : " Who can stay long from the 
Place Royale?" When he returned to Paris in 1654 
— having married in 1652, and having made a long stay 
in Touraine — he came back to his beloved Marais, and 
took a three-years' lease of this apartment. At its 
termination the lease was probably renewed, for it is a 
time-honored tradition that makes this old house the 
place of his death, on October 14, 1660. 

Between fifty and one hundred years later — the exact 
date is not to be got at — the garret above was crowded 
with the pet dogs and cats and birds of Prosper 
Jolyot de Crebillon, who lived in filth among them, 
seldom eating, never washing, always smoking. The 
big blond dramatist had fallen a victim to poverty and 
melancholy, after a short career of success on those 
boards which he stained with the blood of many violent 
deaths. He had said that, since Corneille had taken 
heaven for his own and Racine had seized upon earth, 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 493 

he could place his scenes only in hell. He was rescued, 
and taken from this garret, by the pension obtained 
through La Pompadour. That great lady was not 
prompted by any comprehension of the sombre power 
of his tragedy, but by a desire to wreak her spite against 
Voltaire by the exaltation of a rival. 

Scarron's widow was left in poor case, with only her 
husband's small pension for support, and this was 
stopped by Colbert on the death of Anne of Austria, in 
1666. That Queen-Mother had endowed an institu- 
tion for poor girls and sick women, and with these 
'' Hospitalieres de la Place Royale," Madame Scarron 
found shelter, having sold all that she owned. In 1669 
she was put in charge of the first child of the King and 
Madame de Montespan, and we know all the rest, to the 
secret marriage in 1685. Such of the buildings of the 
" Hospitalieres " as are left now form part of the Hopi- 
tal Andral, and their old roofs and dormers and chim- 
neys take our eye above the low wall as we turn into 
Rue des Tournelles. In this street is the hospital's 
main entrance, and through its gate we look across the 
garden, that stretches back to the former entrance in 
Impasse de Beam ; now opened only to carry out for 
burial the bodies of those dying in the hospital. 

The line of walls along Rue des Tournelles was 
broken by only a few isolated houses, when Frangois 
Mansart selected a site here, and put thereon his own 
dwelling, unpretending as the man himself, in con- 
trast with the grand mansions he had planned for his 
noble and wealthy clients. This is his modest entrance- 



494 THE STONES OF PARIS 

court, at No. 28 Rue des Tournelles, and behind it is 
the simple fagade of his hotel. This building probably 
formed his entire frontage, or it may have been the 
corps-de-logis of a more extensive structure, whose 
two wings reached out toward the street at Nos. 26 and 
30. This number 28, whether the central or the en- 
tire body of the building, remains in perfect preserva- 
tion. At Mansart's death, in 1666, it came, along with 
most of his property, to his sister's son, whom he had 
adopted, and trained to be the architect known as Jules 
Hardouin Mansart. He gained position and pay in 
the royal employ, more by this adoptive name than by 
his abilities. As Superintendent of Buildings under 
Louis XIV. he is responsible for most of the horrors of 
the palace of Versailles, yet the dome of the Invalides 
proves him to have been capable of less meretricious 
work. 

On taking possession of his uncle's mansion, he had, 
as sole tenant of his spacious and inviting first floor, 
Mile. Anne Lenclos, popularly christened Ninon de 
Lenclos, then fifty years of age. Her dwelling is the 
end and object of this short walk, and together with the 
house from which we started, and the one at which we 
ctopped, it gives us a complete picture of the social do- 
ings of the Marais at that period. We are allowed to 
enter among the men with whom we have come, and we 
will go in, let us say, with young de Sevigne, who finds 
his way here frequently, from his pied-a-terre in his 
mother's house, as his father and his grandfather had 
found their way to Ninon's abode. Under the stone 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA IS 495 



balcony on the court-front we step up into a goodly 
hall, from which rises a stone staircase, its outer end 
finely carved, its steps well worn by many visitors 
through the years. An admirable medallion looks down 
from the wall as we mount, and in the rooms above 
we find carved panels and decorated ceilings, many of 
them done by Lebrun and Mignard, probably for the 
fair tenant. They are so carefully kept that canvas 
covers such of them as are feared to be " trop lestes " 
for modern eyes, in the modest words of the ancient 
concierge. Mansart put an excellent fagade on his 
garden-front, and its coupled Ionic columns, and bal- 
conies of wrought-iron railings, are all there unmuti- 
lated. But the garden, then stretching to Boulevard 
Beaumarchais, is now hidden under the shops that 
front on that boulevard. 

To these rooms and this garden thronged the same 
men whom we have seen in the Sevigne and Scudery 
salons, and these reunions were as decorous as those, 
and perhaps somewhat more cheerful and more natural 
in tone. For, while Ninon had the honor of being en- 
rolled in the '' Grand Dictionnaire des Precieuses," 
published in 1661, and while she had been presented at 
the Hotel de Rambouillet at the early age of seventeen, 
she had none of the pretensions nor the ridiculosities of 
" Les Femmes Savantes." She was absolutely genuine, 
not ashamed to be natural, quite ready to laugh or to cry 
with her friends. These friends, drawn to her less by 
her beauty than by her charm, were held always by her 
sunny amiability, her quick sympathies, her frank 



496 THE STONES OF PARIS 

camaraderie. She was the Clarisse of Mile, de 
Scudery's '' Clelie ; " an enjouee aimahle, who never 
denied herself the indulgence of any caprice of head 
or of heart. Yet, as she laughingly confessed, while 
she thanked God every night for the good wits given 
her, she prayed every morning for better protection 
against the follies of her heart. It is a faithful portrait 
that is given in the verse of her day : 

" L' indulge n/e et sage Nature 
A forme Vdme de Ninon^ 
De la volupte d' Epicure, 
Et de la vertu de Caton.'^ 

Beyond most women of that time, she was really 
cultivated, in the best meaning of that word ; far dif- 
ferent from the meaningless Culture with a capital, of 
our time. She was fond of philosophy, withal, and 
took turns with Plato and with Montaigne ; and would 
speculate on the problems of life either with Church 
dignitaries or with the epicurean Saint-Evremond. 
And she captivated them all, men of all sorts, beginning 
with her girlish years — when she dutifully obeyed her 
father, who preached pleasure to her, rather than her 
mother, who pushed her toward a convent — through 
all her long life of incredibly youthful heart and body, 
to her amazing conquests when over sixty. A portrait 
of her at about this age hangs in Kuple House, Seven- 
oaks ; her hair, parted down the middle and plainly 
drawn back in modest fashion, her alluring eyes and her 
ingenuous direct smile, give her the look of a girl. 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 497 



Richelieu was her first admirer, Voltaire was the latest. 
When brought to this house, where he celebrated 
Ninon's ninetieth birthday in verse, young Arouet was 
only about twelve years old, as was told in a preceding 
chapter. She was charmed with the youthful genius, 
and, dying within a few weeks, in 1706, she left him 
two thousand crowns for buying his beloved books. 

From five until nine in the evening, Ninon was " at 
home " here, up to her eighty-fourth year, in 1700. Be- 
fore her visitors went away, they sat down to a simple 
supper, served with no parade and at small expense. 
Many of the guests, following the fashion of Scar- 
ron's friends and of the persistent diners-out of that 
day, brought their own plats. We get a glimpse of the 
simplicity of these suppers " a tons les Despreaux et 
tons les Racine s," and of the homely, social ways of the 
bourgeoisie, in Voltaire's tiresome comedy " Le De- 
positaire." 

We look about these rooms, in which we are stand- 
ing, and wish we might have seen Boileau and Racine 
here ; we seem to see Moliere, reading his unacted and 
still unnamed play, and consulting his hostess as to 
whether " Tartufe " will do for a title ; and old Cor- 
neille, forgetting to be shy and clumsy at her side ; and 
Scarron, wheeled in his chair, quicker in his scoffing 
for her quick catching of the point ; and La Rochefou- 
cauld, less of a surly and egotistic poseur in her pres- 
ence, content to sparkle as a boudoir Machiavelli ; and 
Huyghens, fresh from his discovery of the moons of 
Saturn, finding here a heavenly body of unwonted radi- 



498 THE STONES OF PARIS 

ance, and setting to work to write erotic verse mixed 
with mathematics. The great Conde himself, proud, 
vain, hardest-hearted of men, melts when he meets 
her ; broken and decrepit, he climbs out from his sedan- 
chair — " that wonderful fortification against bad 
weather and the insults of the mud," says delicious 
Mascarille — and approaches, hat in hand, the caliche 
of that other aged warrior, Ninon de Lenclos. 

Through No. 23 of Boulevard Beaumarchais, which 
occupies the site of her garden, we come out on that 
broad thoroughfare, passing on our right the buildings 
covering the gardens that once countrified this east side 
of Rue des Tournelles. We cannot now search among 
the houses there for that one inhabited by the Abbe 
Prevost, some time between 1730 and 1740, while he 
was writing his enthralling story of '' Manon Lescaut." 
Almost at the end of the boulevard, men are sitting 
about tin tables on the pavement, drinking good beer, 
on the very site of the gate of Saint-Antoine. Just 
there, outside the gate, stood Lady de Winter, ppinting 
out to her two hired assassins her pet enemy, d'Artag- 
nan, as he rode out on the Vincennes road, on his way to 
the siege of Rochelle. The gate abutted on the western 
side of the Bastille, and its figures, carved by Jean 
Goujon for decorations of a later day, may be seen in 
the Cluny Gardens. 

Traced in the pavement of Place de la Bastille and 
across Rue Saint-Antoine, you may follow the outlines 
of such portions of the walls and towers of the great 
prison as are not hidden under the houses at the two 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 499 

corners. When you ask for your number in the omni- 
bus office of the place, you are standing in the Bastille's 
inner court. Across its outer eastern ditch and con- 
nected with the wall of Charles V., was thrown a pro- 
jecting bastion, the tower of which stood exactly where 
now rises the Column of July. At the corner of Rues 
Saint-Antoine and Jacques-Coeur, a tablet shows the 
site of the gateway that gave entrance to the outer 
court, which led southwardly along the line of the latter 
small street. By this gateway the armed mob entered 
on July 14, 1789. Lazy Louis XVL, hard at work 
on locks and other trifles at Versailles — having as yet 
no news from Paris — writes in his diary for that day : 
'' Rien" I That mob had found the fortress as little 
capable of resistance as the throne that it overturned 
a while later ; both proved to be but baseless fabrics of 
an unduly dreaded terror. Indeed, it was the power 
behind this prison that was stormed on that day. There 
were plenty of prisons in Paris, as fast and as secret as 
was the Bastille. This was more than a prison to these 
people; it gloomed over their lives as its towers 
gloomed over their street — a mysterious and menacing 
defiance, a dumb and docile doer of shady deeds, a sym- 
bol of an authority feared and hated. And so these 
people first tore away the tool, and then disabled the 
hand that had held it. It was a stirring act in the 
drama, though a trifle melodramatic. 

" Palloy le Patriote/' as he styled himself, takes the 
centre of the stage just here, and, like all professional 
patriots, in all lands and all times, he makes a good 



THE STONES OF PARIS 



thing of his patriotism. He was the contractor for 
demoHshing the walls and for clearing the ground of 
the wreckage, at a handsome price ; and he doubled his 
wage by the sale of the materials. Some of the stones 
went, queerly enough, to the building of Pont de la 
Concorde ; others of them may be seen in the walls of 
the house on the western corner of Boulevard Pois- 
soniere and Rue Saint-Fiacre, and of other houses in 
the town. With the stones not fit for these uses, and 
with the mortar, he made numerous models of the Bas- 
tille, which were purchased by the committees and sent 
as souvenirs to the chief towns of the then newly cre- 
ated departments. One of these models is in the Musee 
Carnavalet. So, too, the thrifty Palloy turned the iron- 
work dug out into hat and shoe buckles, and the wood- 
work into canes and fans and tobacco-boxes ; all, at 
last, into coin for his patriotic pocket. The gate of one 
of the cells was removed, and rebuilt in the prison of 
Sainte-Pelagie ; where it may be seen by the inmates, 
who care nothing for a door more or less, but never by 
the outsider, who would like to get in for a glimpse ! 

To " Palloy the Patriotic" and his gang of a thousand 
workingmen, rides up on his white horse, one day, the 
first commander of the just invented and organized 
National Guard — Lafayette, aptly named by Mirabeau 
the " Cromwell-Grandison " of his nation. He looks 
over the busy ground, and gives orders that the men 
shall receive a pint of wine and a half- franc daily ; but 
they got neither money nor wine, both doubtless " con- 
veyed, the wise it called," on the way, by Palloy or by 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA IS %oi 

Other '' patriots." Lafayette carried away the great key 
of the Bastille's great entrance-door, and sent it to 
George Washington by Thomas Paine, when, a few 
years later, Paine got out of the Luxembourg prison 
and out of France. It is one of the cherished relics at 
Mount Vernon, and not one is more impressive and 
more appropriate in that place, since it was the success 
of the American revolutionists that inspirited those 
who opened the Bastille. 

We pass along Rue Saint-Antoine, so commonplace 
and sordid to-day, so crowded with history and tra- 
dition. It has seen, in its short length, pageants of 
royalty and nobility, the hide-and-seek of romance, the 
blood-letting of sharp blades, the carnage of the com- 
mon people, such as no other street of any other town 
has known. Its memories would fill a fat volume. 

The little temple of Sainte-Marie on our left, as we 
go — a reduced imitation of Rome's Pantheon — is a 
design by Frangois Mansart, and while it has his grace 
of line and his other qualities, it is not a notable work. 
Built on the site of the Hotel de Boissy, wherein Quelus 
died and his lover Henry wept, it was intended for the 
chapel of the " Filles de la Visitation'' and their name 
clings to it, although it has been made over to the Prot- 
estant Church. To this convent fled Mile. Louise de la 
Fayette from Louis XIII. ; who, ardent in the only love 
and the only chase known in his platonic career, visited 
her here until his confessor, Vincent de Paul, showed 
him the scandal of a King going to a nunnery. So he 
had to leave her, secure under the veil and the vows of 



502 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the cloister. She became Soeur, and later Mere, An- 
gelique, of the Convent of Sainte-Madeleine, founded 
in 165 1 by Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., 
which stood on the far-away heights of Chaillot, where 
now is the museum of the Trocadero. There the sister 
and the sweetheart of Louis XIII. lived together for 
many years. 

A few steps farther, and we come to Rue Beau- 
treillis ; its pavement and its houses on both sides, 
nearly as far as Rue Charles V., covering the Cemetery 
of old Saint-Paul ; which extended westerly toward 
Passage Saint-Pierre, wherein we may find the stone 
walls, now roofed in with wood, of the charniers. 
There had been a suburban cemetery outside the old 
wall, which was brought within city limits by the new 
wall, and served as the burial-ground of the pris- 
oners who died in the Bastille. It did not so serve, 
as is commonly asserted, for the skeletons found in 
chains in the cells, when the prison was opened by 
righteous violence, because no such skeletons were 
found. " The Man in the Iron Mask " was buried 
in this ground, close alongside the grave of Rabelais, 
dug exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier. Pass 
through the two courts that lie in the rear of No. 17 Rue 
Beautreillis, and you will find yourself in a large waste 
garden, in one corner of which the persuasive concierge 
points out the grave of the " Masque-de-Fer:' It may 
well be that she is not misled by topographical pride, 
for this ground was certainly a portion of the old burial- 
ground, and not impossibly that portion where Rabelais 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAlS 5^3 

and " Marchioly " were laid near together. This is the 
prisoner's name on the Bastille's burial-register, and 
not far from his real name. For we know, as surely as 
we shall ever know, that this prisoner of State was the 
Count Ercole Antonio Mattioli, Secretary of State of 
Charles IV., Duke of Mantua. The count had agreed to 
betray his trust and to sell his master's fortress of Casale 
to the French representative ; with this in their posses- 
sion, Pignerol belonging already to France, Louis XIV. 
and Louvois would dominate all upper Italy. Mattioli 
took his pay, and betrayed his paymaster ; the scheme 
miscarried, and the schemer deserved another sort of 
reward. His open arrest, or execution, or any public 
punishment, meant exposure and scandal to the Crown 
and the Minister and the Ambassador of France. So he 
was secretly kidnapped, and became *' The Man in the 
Iron Mask." At his death, in 1703, his face was muti- 
lated, lest there might be recognition, even then; the 
walls of his cell were scraped and painted, to obliterate 
any marks he might have put on them ; his linen and 
clothing and furniture were burned. Had Voltaire 
suspected the results of modern research, he would not 
have put forth his theory, in the second edition of his 
" Questions sur I'Encyclopedie," that this prisoner was 
an elder brother of Louis XIV. Yet, but for Vol- 
taire's error, we should have lost those delightful pages 
of Dumas, wherein Aramis carries off from the Bastille 
this elder brother and rightful heir to the crown, leaving 
Louis XIV. in the cell, and at last replaces his puppets 
in their original positions. 



S04 THE STONES OF PARIS 

This Cemetery of Saint-Paul, dating back to Dago- 
bert, when the burial-grounds on the Island had become 
overpeopled, had its own small chapel of the same 
name, which had fallen out of use and into ruin. 
Charles V., bringing it within his enclosure of the 
Hotel Saint-Paul, rebuilt and enlarged it and made it 
the church of the royal parish. All the daughters and 
the sons of France were thenceforth baptized here, and 
it became the favorite church of the nobility. After 
Louis XL's time, and the desertion of this quarter by 
royalty, the little church lost its vogue. In 1794 it was 
appropriated and sold as National Domain, and torn 
down soon after. Its site is covered by the buildings on 
and behind the eastern side of Rue Saint-Paul, opposite 
the space between Passage Saint-Paul and Rue Egin- 
hard. This is the small street selected by Alphonse 
Daudet for the shop of his brocanteur Leemans, to 
which comes the fascinating Sephora, of " Les Rois en 
Exil." Daudet has overdone it in going so far for his 
local color ; the street is a noisome alley, entered by an 
archway from Rue Saint-Paul, holding only two or 
three obscene junk-shops. 

And now, passing the flamboyant Italian facade — 
a meretricious imitation of the front of Saint-Gervais — 
of the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, which has 
absorbed the name of old Saint-Paul, we reach at last 
the ample space where the two streets of Rivoli and 
of Saint-Antoine meet and so make one broad, un- 
broken thoroughfare through the length of the town, 
from the place where the Bastille was to the place now 



THE WOMEN- OF THE MARAIS 505 



named Concorde. This grand highway has existed 
only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The 
Consulate and the First Empire had cut Rue de RivoH 
along the upper edge of the Tuileries .Gardens as far 
easterly as Rue de Rohan ; from there it was prolonged, 
taking the line of some of the old, narrow streets and 
piercing through solid masses of ancient buildings, in 
the last years of Louis-Philippe ; and was carried from 
the Hotel de Ville to this point by the Second Empire. 
All through earlier days, the route, common and royal, 
from the Louvre and the Tuileries to the Hotel 
Saint-Paul, the Tournelles, the Bastille, and the Ar- 
senal, was by way of narrow Rue Saint-Honore and 
its narrower continuation. Rue de la Ferronerie, thence 
around by Rue Saint-Denis into Rue des Lombards, 
and so along Rues de la Verrerie and Roi-de-Sicile to 
the old gate of Saint- Antoine, that stood just behind 
us here at the end of Rue Malher. Outside that gate 
was the country road leading to Vincennes, which 
was transformed into the city street, known to us as 
Rue Saint-Antoine, through the protection given by 
Charles V.'s new wall and by his Bastille. There had 
been, long before, a Rue Saint-Antoine, and it curves 
away here on our left, and is called Rue Frangois- 
Miron, so named in honor of that Prevot des Mar- 
chands in Henri IV.'s time, who merits remembrance 
as an honest, high-minded, capable administrator of his 
weighty office. 

Thus this street of old Saint-Antoine was the thor- 
oughfare—at first from the entrance into the town by 



5o6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

the old gate of Saint-Antoine, and afterward from the 
new street of Saint-Antoine and its entrance gate 
farther east — to the open space behind the Hotel de 
Ville, alongside Saint-Gervais, and so to the bridges 
and the Palace on the Island. It was a street " mar- 
vellously rich " in shops, having nO' rival except in 
Rue Saint-Denis. Its shopkeepers shouted, from their 
doors or from the pavement in front, the merits of 
their wares to the throng swarming always along. 
Their wares were worthy of the city that, with its 
fast-growing population, equalled Venice herself in 
wealth, display, and splendor, if we may trust the 
word of an exultant scribbling citizen of the Paris of 
Charles V. 

So, too, it was the grand highway for royal entries, 
for troops, for ambassadors with their trains, for any 
parade that demanded display and attracted spectators. 
Such an array came along here on August 26, 1660, 
when young Louis XIV. brought into his town his 
young bride, Maria Theresa of Spain, each of them be- 
ing just twenty-two years old. It was the showiest 
pageant and the longest procession yet seen in Paris, 
taking ten or twelve hours to pass. The bride — a 
slight, pretty, girlish figure, in white satin and pearls, 
and a violet mantle of velvet — leaned back on the crim- 
son velvet of her huge gilded chariot ; at her right on 
horseback was the King, in cloth-of-gold and black 
lace, his collars and ruffles of white point. In the re- 
splendent retinue nothing so blazed as the superb 
empty coach of the Cardinal-Minister Mazarin, its 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS ^o^ 



panels painted by Lebrun, drawn by the famous mules 
and escorted by the Mousquetaires. Less than a year 
later Mazarin was carried through Paris in his hearse, 
caring no more for mules or any tomfoolery. 

The procession had entered the town under Claude 
Perrault's triumphal arch at the end of the Vincennes 
Avenue, and through Porte Saint-Antoine, cleaned up 
and sculptured afresh for this day, and so by new 
Rue Saint-Antoine, along this present Rue Fran<;ois- 
Miron. It was packed with spectators, among whom 
was La Fontaine, who sent a long rhymed description 
of the show to his patron, Fouquet, not omitting men- 
tion of the cardinal's mules. These, too, were spoken 
of with fitting praise in a letter written to a friend by 
young Madame Scarron — to be a widow, within a few 
weeks — who was also in the throng. Years after, she 
confessed to the credulous King that on that day she 
had first seen him and first loved him, and that she 
had never ceased to love him since ! We may not con- 
sider the Duchess of Orleans unduly prejudiced when 
she refers to Madame de Maintenon as '' that hussy." 

At No. 88 Rue Frangois-Miron you may see an 
excellent balcony of that period, solidly and richly 
wrought in iron, supported by captivating stone drag- 
ons of fantastic design. There were similar balconies 
on the front of the great mansion at No. 68 — which 
was then No. 62 — but of these only a small one is still 
left over the portal. They were all crowded with a 
most select mob of the elect on the day of this pro- 
cession. There was Anne of Austria, in her black 



5o8 THE STONES OF PARIS 

mantle, looking down on her son, her thoughts turn- 
ing back to her own bridal procession over the same 
route, and her own youthful blond beauty of forty- 
five years before. By her side sat Henrietta of France, 
widow of Charles I., and her daughter, Henrietta 
Anne of England. The girl may have gazed with 
curiosity on the over-dressed fop riding at the bride's 
left wheel. This was Philippe d'Orleans, who was to 
be her husband, and was, through his complacent creat- 
ures, to poison her within ten years from this day. 
In another balcony sat Mazarin, too ill to take part in 
the procession. 

The hostess of these great ladies was one Catherine 
Bellier, wife of Pierre de Beauvais; and this house 
is the Hotel de Beauvais. The husband had been a 
pedlar or a shopkeeper, and had amassed sufficient 
wealth from ribbons to enable him to buy his title. 
The wife had served as first femme-de-chambre to 
Anne of Austria, and had so learned many secrets of 
that queer court, of its Queen-Mother, and of her 
Cardinal. In that court there was no more unscrupu- 
lous creature than this Catherine Bellier. The de- 
liciously outspoken Duchess of Orleans — the second 
wife of that Philippe we have just seen — describes this 
woman as one-eyed and hideous, of profligate life, and 
apt in all intrigue. To the day of her death she loved 
to appear in flamboyant costumes at the court, where 
she was treated with distinction because of what she 
knew. Anne of Austria gave her the stone for the 
construction of this hotel, and she used to visit her 




The H6tel de Beauvais. 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 509 



waiting-woman and conMante here. A popular verse 
of the day ran : 

^^ Merer edi notre auguste Reine, 
Cette charmante Souveraine^ 
Fut chez Madame de Beauvais ; 
Pour de son admirable palais 
Voir ies merveilles etonnantes^ 
Et Ies r aretes surpre7iantes." 

The design of the Hotel de Beauvais, by Antoine 
Lepautre, is most daring and original in its great in- 
terior oval court, embellished with pilasters that are 
topped with finely carved stone masks. Despite the 
unhallowed devotion to cleanliness which, with its 
whitewash, has robbed it of its former lovely bloom 
of age, this court remains one of the most impressive 
specimens of seventeenth-century domestic architect- 
ure in all Paris. From the street we pass through an 
ample gateway, its curved top surmounted by a great 
shell. The vestibule is ornamented with escutcheons, 
alternating with the garlanded ox-skulls of Roman- 
Doric decoration — mistaken by many for rams' heads, 
so as to make a sculptor's pun on Bellier — all admirably 
carved in stone. The noble staircase has Corinthian 
columns, and a massive stone balustrade so perfectly 
pierced into fine lines of intertwisted tracery as to 
give delicacy to it, thick and broad as it is. Cut in 
stone escutcheons in the ceiling of this stairway are 
the intertwined initials of the brand-new nobility that 
built it. The grand salons of the first floor have been 



5 TO THE STONES OF PARIS 

partitioned off into small rooms for trade purposes. 
No character of any sort has been left to the interior. 

The ground on which we tread here, while a portion 
of the Marais of old Paris, is not the Marais of modern 
Paris, as it is commonly designated. Yet this region 
toward the river, built on during the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, after the opening up of the 
grounds of the Hotel Saint-Paul and the cutting of 
streets through them, holds enticements in architecture 
and in story that tempt us to turn our backs for a while 
on our own Marais. 

Many of the streets here remain unmodernized and 
unspoiled, and here are hotels as perfectly preserved 
as this Hotel de Beauvais. At No. 26 Rue Geoffroy- 
Lasnier we stop in delight before an entrance-door 
superbly carved and heavy with a glorious knocker — 
a lion's head holding a great ring in its mouth. Above 
this door we read : " Hotel de Chalons, 162^, et de Lux- 
embourg, i6^p." The small court within, diminished 
by modern stables on one side, retains on its other 
side an ancient iron fountain. The fagade of the 
miniature hotel giving on this court is in well-balanced 
stone and brick; its shapely windows are surrounded 
by male and female masks, and by delicate foliage 
twining about the monograms of the aforetime exalted 
owners — all elaborately carved in stone. The roof 
rises gracefully to its ridge, and each gable end is 
surmounted by a well-wrought iron finial. There is 
a modest garden behind, shut in and hid by the build- 
ings about, which hide, too, the simple and attractive 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 5" 

stateliness of that rear face of the Hotel de Chalons. 
The enchanting isolation and the singular charm of 
this concealed corner give us the feeling that here is 
a bit of Bourges, gently dropped, tranquil and un- 
troubled, into the midst of these turbulent streets. 

A little farther along, at No. 32 in this street of 
Geoffroy-Lasnier, behind a commonplace house-front 
and a commonplace court, you shall find a staircase, 
with an iron rail below and a wooden rail above, that 
make a most uncommon and interesting picture. 

Turning into Rue de Jouy, an altogether delightful 
old-time street, we pass through a monumental gate- 
w^ay at No. 7 into a symmetrical court. Facing us is 
the Hotel d'Aumont, and it tells us more than is told 
by any structure hereabout of the merits of Frangois 
Mansart. This front of two stories and of his own 
roof is faultless in proportion and dainty in adorn- 
ment. He has given it the stamp of the stately days 
of the Grand Monarch by the four mls-de-hoeuf above 
the perfect cornice of the second floor, two on either 
side of the central window. In the two corners of the 
court, at each angle of the building, are round-fronted 
stone perrons, broad and low and inviting. That on 
our left gives entrance to a small hall, the staircase in 
which carries an exquisite wrought-iron rail that lifts 
and lightens the stone steps. By them we mount to 
the chambers of the first floor, small as was the cus- 
tom then, with one grand central reception-room, 
excellent in its proportions, its vaulted ceiling curi- 
ously carved in relief. All these rooms are, by the 



512 THE STONES OE PARIS 

good taste and generous spirit of the owners of the 
property, kept in perfect condition, the furniture is of 
the period, and the painting — done by Lebrun a cen- 
tury later than the ceiHng on which it is placed — is 
fresh and untarnished. 

Mansart's commission for this construction came 
from that Due d'Aumont who was Marechal of France 
and Governor of Paris under Louis XIII. A descen- 
dant of the early fighters of old France, he seems to 
have been one of those favorites of fortune who, in 
the phrase of Beaumarchais, give themselves only the 
trouble to be born. At the age of ten he began his 
career as a colonel of cavalry, and continued it through 
a long line of lucky promotions in place and pay. Dy- 
ing in 1704, he left this hotel packed with furniture, 
paintings, hihelots, and curios, and its stables filled 
with the carriages he had invented; an amazing col- 
lection, requiring months for its sale by his heirs. 

The hotel is now occupied by the Pharmacie Cen- 
trale of France, to whose officials is due our gratitude 
for their rare and scrupulous respect for this delight- 
ful relic. Over its spacious gardens behind they have 
erected their immense laboratories and offices, which 
we may enter under the great vaulted porch at No. 21 
Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyeres. That once narrowest of 
the streets of old Paris, as quaint as its name, given it 
by the branch of the Hyeres nunnery having its seat 
here, has become a broad and bustling thoroughfare. 
The plain rear elevation of the hotel can be seen here 
from the little corner of the garden that is still kept. 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 5^3 

and kept green by the choice plants of the company. 
In it is a capital bust of Dorvault, physician, author, 
founder of the Pharmacie Centrale. This may be the 
very bit of garden noticed by Dr. Martin Lister, an 
English traveller in France at the close of the seven- 
teenth century. He dined with the Due d'Aumont, 
and records that, opening from the dining-room, was 
a greenhouse through which his noble host led him 
into the garden. 

Along through the rocky ravine that bears the name 
of Charlemagne, and does him no honor, we pass, by 
way of Rue Saint-Paul, into the short street that 
started in life as Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, and has now 
taken the name of Charles V. Here, among the an- 
cient fronts, we are attracted by that which is num- 
bered 12, low and wide, with two floors and dor- 
mers above. Through its entrance-door, capped by a 
well-carved mask that smiles stonily down on us, we 
may enter the court by the courtesy of the sister, who 
smiles sweetly. This building is occupied by the girls' 
school of a sisterhood, whose youthful comnmniantes 
happen to be forming in procession for a function to- 
day. They flutter about in innocent white, in uncon- 
scious contrast with the great lady and great criminal 
whom we have come to see. For this was the Hotel 
d'Aubray, and its most distinguished tenant was the 
Marquise de Brinvilliers. 

Let us look about the court and the little garden 
behind, both embraced by the two wings of the struct- 
ure. That wing on our right, with round arches and 



514 THE STONES OF PARIS 

a round tower at its end, is evidently of the original 
fabric and intended for stabling. This wing on our 
left, now extended by a new chapel, was, when built, 
meant to contain only this staircase, whose wide and 
broad stone steps and well-wrought iron balustrade 
mount gradually about a spacious central well. Here, 
resting on the bench at its foot, we may recall what is 
known about the strange and monstrous woman who 
once lived here. 

She was Marie-Madeleine Dreux d'Aubray, and her 
father was an officer of Louis XIV., appointed Civil 
Lieutenant of the Chatelet Prison. He married her in 
165 1, when she was twenty-one, to the wealthy and 
dissolute Marquis de Brinvilliers, who was not a model 
husband. She was nothing loath, with her inborn in- 
stincts, to follow the example set by him. Among her 
lovers, a certain Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was much 
talked of; so much so that the lady's father, more 
powerful than her husband, and doubtless more out- 
raged by the shameless publicity of the liaison, had 
Sainte-Croix taken from his daughter's carriage, as 
they rode together, and put into the Bastille. There 
his cell-mate was an Italian known only as Exili, a 
past-masier in poisons, who boasted that he had 
brought to death at least one hundred and fifty men 
and women in Rome alone. He taught his trade to 
Sainte-Croix, who proved to be an apt pupil, and who 
continued his studies after his release. He took rooms 
with an apothecary in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, 
and fitted up a laboratory. There his Marquise visited 



THE WOMEN OF THE MAR A IS 5^5 



him, and was taught in her turn the use of his potions, 
among which the " manna of Saint-Nicholas " became 
her favorite. 

For she took pains and showed conscience in her 
experiments, mainly on the patients in the hospitals, 
wherein she was a constant charitable worker. Thus 
she soon learned to dispense her poisoned wafers with 
scientific slowness and precision. But she was anxious 
that her charity should begin at home. Her father 
failed gradually with some obscure and unaccountable 
malady, and died in torment ; and she nursed him ten- 
derly to the end. There were too many in her family 
for her comfort, and her relatives outside had been too 
solicitous about her ; so some sickened and some died 
off, she caring for all and lamenting each death. She 
had a sister, a Carmelite nun, who was never blinded 
by the round, girlish face, appealing blue eyes, and be- 
guiling ways that bewitched so many. This woman 
guarded her own life and watched over others of the 
family. The attempts made by the marchioness on 
her husband's life were caused to fail, it is believed, 
by the attenuation of the poisons mixed for her by 
Sainte-Croix, who doubtless feared that he must marry 
the widow if he allowed her to become a widow. He 
himself was found dead, in 1672, in his laboratory, 
poisoned by the fumes of his devilish brews, through 
the breaking of the glass mask worn at his work. The 
official search among his effects discovered a casket, 
addressed to the marchioness at this dwelling; being 
opened, its contents were found to be her own ardent 



5i6 THE STONES OF PARIS 

love-letters to him, a document detailing the doses and 
periods for the proper administration of the poisons, 
and a choice assortment of preparations of opium, 
antimony, sulphur. There was also a water-like liquid, 
unknown to chemists, which was found to kill animals 
instantaneously, leaving no lesions of any organ that 
could be traced by science. Sainte-Croix's servant 
made a disclosure, and the marchioness, hearing of 
his arrest and the finding of her package, made " con- 
fession by avoidance " by a flight to England. She 
slipped down these stairs, out through that doorway, 
and took coach around the corner for a northern port. 

Colbert's brother was then Ambassador at the court 
of Saint James, and between them her capture was 
planned ; she got wind of it, and fled to Liege, where 
she felt sure of safety in a convent. To her appears, 
after a while, a handsome and susceptible young ahhe, 
who allows himself to be corrupted, and arranges for 
an elopement to a more congenial refuge for lovers. 
She climbs gayly into his carriage, his men surround 
it, and she is driven across the frontier into France and 
to the Bastille. The abhe was Desgrais, an eager police 
officer detailed for this duty. He returned to her room 
in the convent, and found scattered sheets of paper con- 
taining notes that began a confession. This confession 
she was forced to complete and confirm by the torture 
by water — repugnant to her coquetry, because it would 
spoil her figure ; '' toute mignonne et toute gracieuse," 
had said an adorer of her early days. She showed cour- 
age at the last, Madame de Sevigne states, in the let- 




The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilhers. 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARATS 517 

ters that were full of the trial and execution. She was 
burned, having first been beheaded. '' Her poor little 
body was thrown, after her execution, into a good 
large fire, and her ashes blown about by the wind ; so 
that we may be breathing her," Sevigne writes. This 
took place late in the afternoon of July 16, 1676 — she 
was just over forty-five years of age — on Place de 
Greve, to which she was carted in a tumbril, having 
stopped on the way in front of Notre-Dame, and there, 
on her knees on the stones — her feet bare, a rope around 
her neck, a consecrated lighted taper in her uplifted 
hand — made to confess afresh. 

The painter Lebrun was one of the great crowd that 
gathered to see her go by, and he made a drawing, 
which you may see in the gallery of Old French Designs 
in the Louvre. She half sits, half reclines, in her tum- 
bril, clad in a gown, its cowl drawn forward; her 
head is thrown back ; her thick chestnut hair brushed 
away from her face ; her eyes are wide and her mouth 
drawn with terror; her face is round, her lips are 
thick; in her folded hands she holds a cross, and she 
stares straight before her without seeing. At one side 
is the profile of a woman, very lean and ugly, her ex- 
pression full of horror as she bends forward to gaze. 

Turning from this street down through Rue Beau- 
treillis, we pass the end of Rue des Lions, on whose 
southern side we have already found remains of the 
Hotel des Lions du Roi. On its northern side is a row 
of plaster-fronted houses, commonplace and shabby. 
In one of those garrets there was living, shortly after 



5i8 THE STONES OF PARIS 

1830, a poor family of Jews named Felix, lately arrived 
from the Canton Aarau in Switzerland. Their two 
Httle girls went about the streets, singing and picking 
up coppers. One day in the Place Royale, among those 
who stopped to listen was a kindly eyed gentleman, 
who handed to the younger and thinner of the two 
pinched children a piece of silver. " That is Victor 
Hugo," said a woman in the crowd, as he went his 
vs^ay to his home in the corner. That small singer was 
Elisa Rachel Felix, known to us as the great Rachel. 

Years after, when the world had given all that it 
could give to Rachel, she returned, from a voyage to 
Egypt in search of health, to the Place Royale to die. 
" It is on the way to Pere-Lachaise," she said, when, 
in 1857, she moved into the immense and superbly fur- 
nished apartment on the first floor of No. 9, where 
her friends, she thought, would have ample room for 
her burial service. It is only a step in space from this 
garret to that palace. There, within a few months — 
although her death came at the country-seat of Vic- 
torien Sardou's father, whom she was visiting — that 
service was held, and from there her body was borne 
to Pere-Lachaise. 

Going down Rue du Petit-Musc, we reach the Quai 
des Celestins, and here on our left is the beginning of 
broad Boulevard Henri IV., cutting away, in its di- 
agonal course through the grounds of the Hotel Saint- 
Paul, much history and romance. Nothing is left of 
the gardens of the Hotel de Lesdiguieres, whose site 
is marked by a tablet on the corner of the street of that 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA IS 519 

name, at No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. This tablet tells 
us that the hotel was the residence of the Czar Peter 
the Great in 1717; the guest, during his short sojourn 
in Paris, of the Marechal de Villeroy, its owner then. 
We prefer to go back from that visit over a hun- 
dred years to a more attractive presence in this house. 
This was Gabrielle d'Estrees, beloved of Henry, who 
— for his fondness for her and their two fine boys — 
would have made her his wife, and have made them 
his legitimate successors, if he could have had his 
way. 

It was Sebastien Zamet who was their host in 
this " palais d' amour du roi." The son of a shoe- 
maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in Paris, like 
so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built 
here " a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," 
says Saint-Simon. And here, walking in the garden 
after supper on the evening of April 9, 1599, ^be lovely 
Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They carried 
her to the Hotel de Sourdis and put her in the care of 
her aunt, with whom she had passed a portion of her 
girlhood in that mansion. It stood within the precincts 
of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, its entrance on Rue de 
I'Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue Perrault. 
Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o'clock of the 
next morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and 
the rest, but by whose hand we shall never know. The 
Plotel des Mousquetaires, that you will find at No. 4 
of Rue de TArbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so, 
too, were many of these tall faQades, with ancient, iron 



520 THE STONES OF PARIS 

balconies that look down on the narrow winding street, 
then a crowded thoroughfare of old Paris. After 
Zamet's death his house was bought by the Due de 
Lesdiguieres, Marshal and later Constable of France, 
from whom it took its permanent name. We have al- 
ready come here with Boileau to see the veteran Fron- 
deiir, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, whose last 
years were passed in this mansion, under the care of 
one niece, Madame de Lesdiguieres, and comforted 
by another niece, Madame de Sevigne. 

On the quay, off on our left, the Celestins caserne 
occupies a small portion of the immense grounds of 
the Celestins Monastery. It was a rich community, 
made so by the many gifts of kings, from Charles V. 
down, to " leurs bien aimes chapelains et serviteiirs en 
Dieu." These pious beggars were not too proud to 
accept anything, and time fails to tell of the splendors 
of their church, which became a museum of monu- 
ments, tombs, statues, and was demolished in 1849, 
many of its treasures having been destroyed during 
the Revolution. The godly brethren are remembered 
in the name of the barracks and of the quay, and to 
some of us, it must be owned, by the delectable dish 
of their invention, omelette a la Celestins. 

That long facade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs 
to the Arsenal, the building alone left, its spacious 
gardens now under streets and houses. We have come 
to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped from 
his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue 
Lesdiguieres. We have driven here with Madame Re- 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 521 



camier on the day before her death. The most win- 
ning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, 
an adorable man of genius, whose very defects were 
lovable, we are told by the elder Dumas, who loved 
him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were hissing, almost 
in the same year, each his own damned play. Many 
others besides Dumas loved Nodier— Royalists and 
Republicans, Classicists and Romanticists; and they 
crowded his salon here of an evening. For this was 
his official residence as Librarian, occupied by him 
from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. 
His historic green drawing-room, where men were 
friendly who fought outside, and the smaller rooms of 
his apartment on the first floor overlooking Boulevard 
Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are 
now its reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time 
panelling, carvings, mouldings, but their walls, once 
decorated en grisaille, have been toned to a uniform 
delicate gray-white. 

This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d'Ar- 
tois, who purchased the valuable books and manuscripts 
of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d'Argenson, and of the 
Due de la Valliere. Rooms in the Arsenal were ar- 
ranged for this collection, and it was named the '' Li- 
brairie de Monsieur; " the Comte d'Artois, brother of 
Louis XVI. and of Louis XVIIL, having been the last 
"' Monsieur " in France. His library has grown to be 
the grandest in Paris after the Bibliotheque Nationale. 
It contains the original archives of the Bastille— such 
as were saved, when so many were scattered and de- 



522 THE STONES OF PARIS 

stroyed at its taking — and it is especially rich in dra- 
matic literature and in manuscripts. 

Here, above our heads as we stand in Rue du Petit- 
Musc, is the tasteful, unspoiled side wall of the Hotel 
de Lavallette, formerly the Hotel Fieubet. It was 
built by the younger Mansart, on the corner of Saint- 
Paul's grounds, for the Chancellor of Maria Theresa, 
Gaspard de Fieubet, and it became a gathering-place 
of the writers of those days. They were courted by 
its owner, whose name is frequent in the letters of 
Madame de Sevigne, and he himself turned his hand 
to rhyming, at odd hours. Nearly two hundred years 
after he had gone, his mansion was rescued from the 
sugar-refiners, who had degraded it to their uses, by 
the Lavallette who has given it his name, and who 
" restored " it beyond the recognition of its great archi- 
tect, could he see it now. Its facade behind the little 
court is overloaded with carvings, buttressed by cary- 
atides, surmounted by campaniles ; it is a debauch of 
sculpture, an orgy of ornamentation, under which the 
stately lines of the original fabric are almost lost. They 
are quite hidden, on one side, by a modern wing that 
has been thrust in on the court. All this dishonor to 
architecture does not trouble the boys, whose big school 
fills the building now, and who troop about the court 
in their black jackets and trousers, their wide, white 
collars, their big, white ties, pulling on reluctant gloves, 
as they line up on their unwilling way to some church 
function. 

We pass along the quay, glancing at the homelike 



THE IV OMEN OF THE MARA IS 523 

and homely house numbered 4, whose quiet dignity 
behind its court is in pleasing contrast with the place 
just left. Here were the home and the studio of An- 
toine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875. 

On the quay at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul there 
stood until very lately the entire and unchanged hotel 
built for young Charles, Due de La Vieuville, in the 
last days of the Valois men. It was an admirable 
specimen of the architecture of their time, as we may 
still assure ourselves by a glance at the wing that is 
left within the court entered from Rue Saint-Paul ; a 
stone side wall toned to the glorified grayness of age, 
pierced by tall, slender windows of graceful propor- 
tions, and, above, the picturesque brick dormers of that 
period. 

The last of the Valois women. Marguerite, had her 
home hard by here, and its story begins just on this 
spot. When Charles V., to round out and make entire 
his Saint- Paul estate, was taking in neighboring hotels 
and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we 
find the Hotel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the 
archbishops of Sens. Their palace on this corner, and 
its grounds extending along the river-front and back 
along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond pres- 
ent Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this 
angle of the royal domain. The King took this prop- 
erty, giving in exchange, to the archbishop, the feudal 
fortress, the Hotel d'Estomenil, a little farther west on 
the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several country 
roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hotel- 



524 THE STONES OF PARIS 

de-Ville, Figtiier, Fauconnier, de I'Ave-Maria; and 
where they meet stands the Hotel de Sens, in almost 
the same state, as to its walls, as when they were fin- 
ished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This 
soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last 
years of the fifteenth and the earliest years of the six- 
teenth century, and it remains an authentic and au- 
thoritative document of the domestic architecture of 
that period. The delicate ornamentation of its facade 
has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the 
fabric, its gardens are built upon, their great trees are 
gone, yet it stands, time-stained and weather-worn, a 
most impressive example of that Gothic strength and 
beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to melt 
under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance. 

The noble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch 
of genius, pinched forward at its topmost point, and 
is there sliced away, so as to make a snub-nosed pro- 
tuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its 
two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, 
as we see them hemmed in by other buildings, but their 
panelling and moulding plead for pardon for any 
slight disproportion ; and the one on the corner is per- 
fect in situation and in effect. The few windows of 
the front have lost their stone-crossed muUions, some 
broken, some bricked up. The great dormer window 
above, possibly of later construction, is a prediction of 
the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we 
see in the roofs of Rouen's Hotel de Ville and of the 
chateau of Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once 




The Hotel de Sens. 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 525 



entirely of stone, has been marred by cheap patching. 
As to the rest, the oddities and irregularities of this 
facade are yet all in good taste and all captivating. 
Within the groined porch we see, across the small 
court, the main building meant for the archbishop's 
dwelling, and the solid square tower meant for de- 
fence and for watching. Its entrance-door tells, in its 
size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away 
up on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry- 
box, battlemented and supported by corbelled brackets. 
The interior of the buildings has been defaced and 
degraded by the base usages to which it has been sub- 
jected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some 
of the rooms and halls. 

These awaited in orderly and decorous silence, in 
their early days, the coming of their owner from the 
mother-church at Sens. He came along the banks of 
the Yonne and the Seine on his richly caparisoned 
mule, his foot-servants in advance, his clerkly servitors 
and ecclesiastics riding behind, and so he entered into 
this tranquil court. Years later the place was noisy 
enough, when the religious wars made it one of the 
meeting-places of the leaders of the Holy League. On 
the very day when Henri IV. entered Paris, the Arch- 
bishop of Sens, Cardinal de Pelleve, lay dying in this 
his palace, almost within hearing of the triumphant Te 
Deum in Notre-Dame. 

The King had been allowed his divorce by his child- 
less wife. Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to 
return to Paris from her long exile in Auvergne ; or- 



526 THE STONES OF PARIS 

dering that this hotel should be fittingly arranged for 

her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a charming 

child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she 

comes here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her 

wonted fires still smouldering under the ashes. It is 

between these two appearances that we like to look 

on her in the pages of Brantome and on the canvas of 

Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantome, 

has been aptly dubbed the valet-de-place of history; 

and yet a valet has the merit of looking out of his own 

eyes from his own point of view. It was for him that 

Marguerite wrote her " Memoires," and to him she 

left them. In after days, when exiled from the court 

he loved, able only to lick the chops of memory, he 

wrote her eloge in these glowing words : '' If there 

has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, 

it is the Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or 

shall be, near her, are ugly beside her. If there is a 

miscreant who believes not in the miracles of God, let 

him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather 

a goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet 

perhaps no goddess was ever so lovely." 

It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom 
we see in Clouet's half life-size portrait in the chateau 
of Azay-le-Rideau. Her plentiful blond hair curves 
back above her fine brow, and her bluish-gray eyes 
smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Bran- 
tome has to own that his goddess was easily first in 
the escadron volant that sailed under her mother's 
flag, and we may guess what that meant in the court 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA IS 527 



" whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and 
whose virtues were homicide and adultery." 

In this Hotel de Sens, Madame Marguerite held re- 
ceptions, twice a week, of men of letters and of the 
arts, with whom her learning allowed her to converse 
on equal terms ; and her kindliness allowed them to feel 
at ease. For " from her behavior it could never be dis- 
covered that she had once been the wife of the King." 
But the wayward Margot made trouble for herself 
that ended her stay here after a year or less. She came 
home from mass at the Celestins on the morning of 
Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from 
her coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he 
was killed by her latest discarded favorite, already 
twenty. She sat in one of these front windows the 
next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept 
meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the 
jaunty assassin; that evening she left the Hotel de 
Sens forever. For a while she stayed at her hunting- 
lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former pages, 
and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern 
bank in the Pre-aux-Clercs, which looked out across 
the river at the Louvre, where Henry was unhappy with 
her successor. The two women remained always 
friendly, and were seen together in festivities and pro- 
cessions, and the reigning Queen paid many a debt of 
the deposed Queen. To the last she rouged to the eyes, 
and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit she had 
turned devote, and had found a new idol in her con- 
fessor. This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet 



528 THE STONES OF PARIS 

canonized, whose chaste ministrations made him adored 
by sinners elderly enough to repent. There she died 
in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the last 
of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, 
to young Louis XIII. 

Later along in the seventeenth century, when the 
court end of the town went to the west, and the Church 
dignitaries found this region too far afield, this Hotel 
de Sens was sold. Its new owners and tenants were 
the merchants and financiers who crowded then to this 
quarter. They, too, soon moved farther west, and the 
place had many strange employments forced upon it. 
As early as 1692, the messageries for Dijon and Lyons 
rented it for their town head-quarters. By the middle 
of the eighteenth century, the palace of the archbishops 
was degraded to a livery stable and a horsedealer's 
lair, and the ancient arms of Sens on its front and the 
escutcheons of Lorraine and Bourbon, prelates of the 
Church, were covered by a great sign, " Maison de Rou- 
lage et de Commission." From this court, in the words 
of the advertisement of that date, " Le Courrier de la 
Malle de Paris a Lyons partit a cinq heures et demi du 
soir, 8 Floreal, an IV." — which was April 27, 1796. 

That mail-coach was stopped near Lieussart, its 
driver killed, and a large sum in assignats and gold car- 
ried ofif. For this crime one Joseph Lesurques was ar- 
rested, and was recognized by several witnesses as the 
robber. He had been an official in Douai, had saved 
money, and had gone to Paris for the education of his 
children. Neither his record nor his alibi sufficed to 




Marguerite de Vak.is. 

(From a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musee de Montpellier.) 



[Prom a carbon print by Braun, Clement b° Co.] 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA J S 529 

acquit him, the strongest of circumstantial evidence 
convicted him, and he was executed on October 30, 
1796. Two years later the murderer and robber was 
captured in one Dubosc, who, after a daring escape 
and recapture, went to the guillotine. By Dubosc's 
conviction Lesurques was posthumously morally ac- 
quitted, but his judicial rehabilitation has never been 
made, albeit his broken and crazed children petitioned, 
courts debated, and Deputies chattered through many 
long years. This true story, our last reminiscence of 
the Hotel de Sens, has been put on the French stage 
as " Le Courrier de Lyons," and on the English stage 
as " The Lyons Mail." 

We go on to the upper end of Rue Fauconnier, and 
across Rue Saint- Antoine, to where begins Rue Pavee- 
au-Marais, a most ancient and aristocratic street, filled 
with grand mansions in its best days and in days not 
so long gone. It had taken its name as early as the 
middle of the fifteenth century, when, first of all the 
Marais streets, it was paved. It was known, unoffi- 
cially and popularly, as le petit Marais, so closely did 
it crowd, within its short and select Hmits, the essential 
characteristics in architecture and atmosphere of the 
great Marais. Now, wofully modernized, it holds one 
relic only, a magnificent relic, that suggests to us, in 
its solitary dignity, something of the lost glories of 
this street. 

We cross Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a main thorough- 
fare of old Paris, whose odd name came from Charles, 
brother of Saint Louis, Count of Anjou and Provence, 



530 THE STONES OF PARIS 

and King of Naples and Sicily in 1265. His fortified 
abode stood on the northern side of this street, at its 
eastern end just within the old walls. It became, in 
after times, the hotel and then the prison of La Force, 
Its entrance was over yonder, at the corner of modern 
Rue Malher; and opposite, on the southern corner, 
was the stone that served as the axeman's block for 
the Princess of Lamballe. Along this pavement the 
small Gavroche led the two smaller Thenardier boys, 
on his way to his hotel — the plaster elephant in Place 
de la Bastille. A wide avenue, bordered by modern 
constructions, is fast taking the place of the old street 
and robbing it of all its character. 

Where Rue Pavee meets Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 
stands the Hotel Lamoignon, formerly the Hotel 
d'Angouleme. At that corner a square turret juts out 
from above the ground floor, overhanging the pave- 
ment, its supporting bracket cut under in shell-like 
curves. About the stately court, entered from Rue 
Pavee, rise the imposing walls, those of the wings of 
a little later date and a little more ornate than that of 
the fagade. This front is pre-eminently impressive in 
its height, in the unusual loftiness of its floors and their 
windows, in the single Corinthian pilasters, tall and 
slender and graceful, rising from ground to cornice. 
They may serve us as a souvenir of Jean Bullant's 
work in the chateau of Ecouen and in his portion of 
Chantilly. Above that cornice the dormer windows 
spring high under their gabled ends. Beneath them, 
and over the entrance porch, and on the side wall of 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 531 



Rue des Francs-Bourgeois— profusely decorating, but 
not overloading, the spacious surfaces that carry them 
easily— we trace without effort the unworn hunting- 
horns, the stags' heads, the dogs in chase, the crescent 
and the initial H so interlaced as to form an H and a 
D — all the carved emblems of Diane de France, for 
whom this remarkable structure was planned and 
built, a little after 1580, by a now unknown architect. 
She was born of an Italian mother, during a stay in 
her country of the son of Frangois L, who was later 
Henri II. On coming to the throne, in 1547, he legiti- 
matized this daughter, then ten years of age, and gave 
her education and position in France. She grew up 
to be a good woman and a good wife to Horace Far- 
nese. Due de Castro, and to her second husband, Fran- 
cois, the eldest son of the Constable Montmorenci. 
She spent her long life — which saw seven monarchs 
sitting on the French throne— doing kindly acts, not 
one of which meant so much for the France she loved 
as the reconciliation between Henri III. and Henri 
de Navarre ; possible through her, because the sceptic 
Bearnais took her word for or against any written 
word of anyone. Dying in 1619, she left this mansion 
to Charles, Due d'Angouleme, son of Charles IX. and 
Marie Touchet, the last of her many benefactions to 
him. He added these wings, and placed in that on 
the northern side this stately stone staircase, filling the 
width between the stone walls, with no hand-rail to 
break its sweep. Nothing is left of the former gran- 
deur of the interior, which is given up to large indus- 



53^ THE STONES OF PARIS 

tries and petty handicrafts ; even the vast and lofty 
chambers are cut up for trade purposes by partitions 
and by interposed floorings. 

In 1658 the Hotel d'Angouleme became the Hotel 
Lamoignon by purchase of Guillaume de Lamoignon, 
a wealthy President of Parliament, and in 1684 it went 
to his son, Chretien-FranQois de Lamoignon. It was 
a dwelling worthy of him and of his illustrious name, 
which it still bears. In it he received the best society 
of that day — represented to us by Racine, Boileau, 
Bourdaloue, Regnard, and others of their kidney, all 
honored in finding a friend in this magistrate of abil- 
ity, probity, kindliness. It was to him that Boileau ad- 
dressed his " Sixth Epistle," and to him, when, as 
Master of Requests, it was his official duty to forbid 
further performances of " Tartufe " after the first 
night, Moliere submitted without rancor. Perhaps his 
highest honor, during a life of honors, was his refusal 
of an election to a fauteuil in the Academie Fran(;aise. 

On April 13, 1763, in this building was opened the 
first public library of the Hotel de Ville of Paris. One 
Antoine Moriau had been for many years collecting, 
in his apartment on this second floor, some 14,000 vol- 
umes and 200 manuscripts, all left to the town at his 
death in 1759. The municipality kept his rooms, and 
rented additional rooms on this first floor, opening 
them to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays. 

The concierge or his wife, honored by the interest 
shown in their splendid show-place, will conduct such 
curious strangers as may wish around the corner into 




The Hotel Lamoignon. 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 533 

Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and through a Httle gate 
on that street into a small back court. This is the 
shabby remnant of Diane's and of Lamoignon's exten- 
sive gardens, which once stretched to those of the Hotel 
de La Force on the south, and eastwardly to Rue 
Sevigne. From this spot you may see four or five 
windows away up in the rear wall of the mansion, and 
you will be told that these are the windows of Alphonse 
Daudet's former apartment, wherein he wrote " Fro- 
mont jeune et Risler aine." His large study on the top 
floor had two high, wide windows, from which he saw 
the roofs of all Paris on that side. Against the wall 
at one end of the room was his shelf for standing at 
his work, and his wife's desk was at the other end ; 
while, between them, carrying the freshly written 
sheets, trotted the little boy Leon, who is now a man, 
wdelding his own good pen. To him, in those days, 
the tall Flaubert and Tourgueneff were " giants " by 
the side of his father, and of the other friends who used 
to climb these many stairs to this salon in the sky. 
Daudet has left affectionate records of the old house. 
His " Rois-en-exil " was written in a pavilion in the 
garden of Richelieu's old mansion, which stood in the 
northwestern corner of the then Place Royale, now 
Place des Vosges, where has been cut, through house 
and garden, the prolongation of Rue des Francs-Bour- 
geois in Rue des Vosges. 

The gentle artist, " handsome as a Hindoo god " in 
those days, says M. Claretie, brought from his beloved 
Midi a longing for space and air and quiet, and all his 



534 THE STONES OF PARIS 

abodes in the city were high above the street, with ample 
breathing-space and unbroken horizon. His earHest 
Paris home was at the very top of the furnished Hotel 
du Senat, still at No. 7 Rue de Tournon. This was the 
wretched room to which he came back, early one morn- 
ing, from his first swell reception, his only dress-suit 
drenched with the wet snow through which he had 
waded, owning no overcoat. Then, for a while, he 
occupied an entresol in No. 4 Place de TOdeon, in '' la 
maison A. Laissiis/' one of the unaltered houses of 
that historic place. His last home was on the third 
floor of No. 31 Rue Bellechasse, in the heart of the Fau- 
bourg Saint-Germain, and one of its delightful old 
gardens lay beneath his windows, giving him the green- 
ness and the tranquillity so dear to him. 

The name of Madame Daudet may not be omitted 
from this record of the illustrious women of the 
Marais, although now, in the maturity of her dis- 
tinction and elegance, she adorns another quarter of 
Paris. She has made for herself an honored place 
among French women of letters, and slie helped her 
husband to his own place by her critical powers and 
her sympathetic appreciation. She both tranquillized 
and stimulated him through his earlier years of ro- 
bust strength, and the later invalidism that was yet 
filled with labor. Her son, who carried the father's 
sheets across the room to her for approval or cor- 
rection, has dedicated his " Alphonse Daudet " to his 
mother, " who aided and encouraged her husband alike 
in the hours of discouragement and of hopefulness." 



THE WOMEN OF THE MAR A IS 53 S 



There are bits and fragments of vanished antiquity — 
portals, windows, balconies, brackets, pitifully sundered 
from the grandeur they stand for and suggest — scat- 
tered all about this portion of the Marais. Much of this 
bygone grandeur was to be found in Rue des Francs- 
Bourgeois, a street that had been a country road just 
outside the wall of Philippe-Auguste, and, with the 
crumbling of the wall, had been speedily built up with 
stately mansions. One of these, with a fund for its sup- 
port, was willed, in 141 5, to the Grand Prior of France, 
in trust for such burghers as were freed from all 
taxation by reason of their extreme poverty. So it came 
that these francs bourgeois gave their name to the 
street. Here at No. 30 is a quaint low front, mostly 
taken up by a spacious entrance-porch, decorated with 
finely cut dragons; here at No. 31 is the superb portal 
of the Hotel Jeanne d'Albret ; all that is left of the no- 
ble residence of that niece of Francois I. who married 
the Due de Cleves in 1541. It is more than a century 
from that date before this hotel holds any history for us, 
when it became tenanted by Cesar Phebus d'Albret, 
Marshal of France; a rich and frolicsome Gascon, a 
friend of Scarron, an especial friend of young Madame 
Scarron. It was he who killed the Marquis de Sevigne 
in a duel. The Duchesse d'Albret was an eminently 
proper person, a bit of a precieuse, and her salon here 
was a flimsy copy of that of the Hotel Rambouillet. 
Scarron's widow, poor and by no means unfriended, 
found a temporary home in this house, after a short 
stay with her life-long friend. Mile, de Lenclos, before 



536 THE STONES OF PARIS 

taking rooms in the convent, where we have seen 
her. 

When la veuve Scarron, reincarnated in Madame de 
Maintenon, was Hving in the grand estabHshment at 
Vaugirard, provided by the King for his two children, 
she is said, by local tradition, to have had her private 
apartment in the Marais, near where we stand. It was 
on the first floor of the small and shabby house at No. 
7 bis Rue du Perche, and you are shown a ceiling in 
an upper room, that is claimed to have been painted for 
the great lady. It is in four sunken squares, wherein 
pose the four Seasons, in conventional attitudes and 
unconventional raiment. 

Let us stop here on the southern side of Rue des 
Francs-Bourgeois, where it meets the end of a little 
street with the big name of des Hospitalieres-Saint- 
Gervais, given to it by the great hospital and monastery 
that occupied these grounds, through which this street 
was afterward cut, when Philippe-Auguste gathered 
them just within the safe-keeping of his wall. Just 
without that wall lay the Hotel Barbette, in the midst of 
its own wide lands. On this corner, we stand just on 
the line of the wall, and look across Rue des Francs- 
Bourgeois into a court, once the Allee aux Arbaletriers, 
over whose entrance is a tablet, recording the murder 
of Louis d'Orleans, near that spot — a scene sketched in 
our first chapter. That maze of courts, crowded close 
with ancient wooden structures, tempts us to search 
w^ithin it for vestiges of the outbuildings of the Hotel 
Barbette. And it is worth while exploring the interior 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAlS 537 

of the corner house, if only for its mediaeval staircase. 
Coming out by the courts opening into Rue Vieille-du- 
Temple, we take a few steps to where it meets the south- 
ern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and we stand on 
the exact site of the Porte Barbette of the old wall. 

There, on the northeastern corner of the two streets, 
stands a most ancient building well worth our regard. 
On the angle, reaching from just above its ground floor 
to the cornice, is hung a five-sided tourelle of singular 
beauty. Its heavy supporting bracket is deeply and 
handsomely corbelled out, and at each angle is a slim 
colonette, delicately carved. The division line between 
its two stories is defined by a fine moulding. In the 
first story is cut a small ogival window, under a pret- 
tily crocketed head and a flat finial. This window is 
iron grated, and its grim visage is softened by a flower- 
ing plant set within. The panels of the lower story 
are plain, and those above are decorated with a lace-like 
pattern, graceful and elegant, whose lines and curves 
carry one's eye to the cornice. The plain fagade of the 
house in Rue Vieille-du-Temple has been degraded by 
modern windows, while that in the other street remains 
most impressive, with its gabled end. All in all, no 
such delightful specimen of fifteenth-century Gothic as 
this Barbette turret can be found in our Marais. 

Yet turret and structure are not, as is often stated, 
any portion of the original Hotel Barbette. That was 
built, at the end of the thirteenth century, by Etienne 
Barbette, a man of wealth and importance, the Provost 
of Paris under Philippe " le Bel," and his Master of the 



538 



THE STONES OF PARIS 




The Tourelle of the Hotel Barbette. 

Mint. The vast enclosure of his grandiose hotel cov- 
ered all the ground, from the old wall northward to the 
line of the present Rues de la Perle and du Parc-Royal ; 
and eastwardly from this Rue Vieille-du-Temple 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA IS 539 



to the gardens of Saint-Catherine du Val-des-Ecoliers, 
near where now runs Rue Sevigne. This ample do- 
main sufficed for the menus plaisirs of this lucky man, 
and was merely his petit sejour. Under that blameless 
guise it served as the abode, a little more then a century 
later, when rebuilt after the mob had wrecked it, of 
Isabeau de Baviere, official wife of mad Charles VI. 
Leaving him to the neglect of servants and to the com- 
panionship of Odette, the Queen escaped boredom here, 
by her dinners and suppers, balls and fetes ; here she 
invented, or first introduced, the masquerades that were 
soon the rage of Polite Society. She amused herself 
with other games, too ; such as statecraft, in partner- 
ship with her husband's younger brother, Louis d'Or- 
leans. It was from the Barbette that she mismanaged 
the kingdom, ground down the people with intolerable 
taxes, pushed the marriage of her daughter Catherine 
with Henry V. of England, plotted the shameful Treaty 
of Troyes, which made France an appanage of the Eng- 
lish crown, and gave Paris to English troops. 

After her husband's death, cast aside by Burgundy 
and England, she found a drearier refuge in the Hotel 
Saint-Paul than that to which she had condemned him 
there. In its corners she hid while Joan the Maid was 
undoing the evil work done by this shameless woman, 
and was bringing back to Paris the son hated by this 
shameless mother. All through those years she wept 
and moaned, witnesses have reported ; left alone, as she 
was, with the memories of her lusts and her treasons, 
with the wreckage of the animal beauty, for which, and 



K46 THE STONES OF PARIS 



for no other quality, she had been selected as the royal 
consort. Seven days after she learned of the signing 
of the Treaty of Arras she died, '' et son corps fvit tant 
meprise," says Brantome, that it was thrown into a 
boat at the water-gate of Saint-Paul, and, after an un- 
seemly service in Notre-Dame, was sent by night down 
the Seine to Saint-Denis, *' ainsi ni plus ni moins qu'une 
simple demoiselle ! " 

Partly destroyed by fire and partly rebuilt, we find 
the Hotel Barbette, after another hundred vears and 
more, in the hands of the Comte de Breze, Seneschal of 
Normandy. Aged, ugly, crippled, as we see him in 
Hugo's verse, he is pleasantly remembered for the 
lovely widow he left for Henri H., and for his lovely 
tomb left, for our joy, in the cathedral of Rouen. When 
his widow, Diane de Saint-Vallier, became Diane de 
Poictiers, Duchesse de Valentinois — an elderly siren of 
thirty-seven, who was yet " fort aymee et servie d'un 
des grands rois et valenreux du monde " — she wore 
always her widow's white and black, and kept to the 
last that whiteness of skin and purity of complexion 
that came, she claimed, from her only cosmetic, soap 
and water. Her coldness of heart had much to do with 
it, to our thinking. Brantome saw her when she had 
come to sixty-two, and was struck by her freshness, 
" sans se farder," as of thirty. He adds, with his ever- 
green susceptibility : " Cest dommage que la terre 
couvre ce beau corps." This property had gone, on 
her husband's death, in 1561, to his and her two daugh- 
ters ; who profited by its vast extent and by the ex- 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA IS 54 1 

ample set by Francois I. in similar jobs, to open streets 
through it, and divide it into parcels for selling. Those 
streets were named Barbette and Trois-Pavilions, the 
latter now renamed Elzevir. And if any remnant ex- 
ists of the second Hotel Barbette of Diane de Poictiers, 
it is this corner house and its lovely turret. 

By way of this corner, the body of Louis d'Orleans 
was carried to the Church of the Blancs-Manteaux, in 
the street of that name just behind us. It lay till morn- 
ing in the nave, and about the bier gathered royalty and 
nobility, all through the long November night. The 
church is gone, and so, too, is his chapel in the Church 
of the Celestins ; and the monument, erected there by 
Louis XIL to his murdered grandfather and his mar- 
tyred grandmother, has been placed in the Cathedral 
of Saint-Denis. The site of the Church of the Blancs- 
Manteaux is covered by the great central establishment 
of the Mont de Piete; its grounds are entirely built 
over ; the street that took the name of the monastery, 
once a perilous coupe-gorge, has grown to be, not re- 
spectable, but characterless. We must be content with 
the phantoms of Saint Louis's white-mantled monks, 
strolling in their cloisters ; later, grown fat and scamp- 
ish, haunting the low cabarets of this mal-famed street, 
and rehearsing, within their own precincts, those 
frenzied mysteries of the mediaeval stage, that led to the 
disbandment and the driving-out of the debauched 
order. 

A step to the south from this street, along Rue Vieille- 
du-Temple, brings us to the massive entrance-doors of 



54^' THE STONES OF PARIS 

No. 47. Their outer surfaces are richly carved with 
masks and with figures ; on their inner side is an excel- 
lent bas-relief representing Romulus and Remus found 
by the shepherd, when the wolf is giving them suck. 
About the court, diminutive and dainty, the walls of 
the small hotel are adorned with tasteful sculptures, 
and laden with dials, two of the sun and two of the 
moon. These anomalous adornments came here 
through the caprice of a Director of the Royal Observa- 
tory, who once occupied the house and who wreaked his 
scientific humor in this odd fashion. This is the Hotel 
de Hollande, a rebuilt remnant of the large mediaeval 
mansion of Marechal de Rieux. The street just in 
front of his hotel, some authorities insist, was the scene 
of the assassination of the Due d'Orleans. Recon- 
structed early in the seventeenth century, the carv- 
ings, sculptures, and decorations of this elegant little 
hotel are excellent examples of late Renaissance. Un- 
luckily, the bas-reliefs and paintings of the interior 
may no longer be seen. Beyond this outer court is a 
smaller court, containing an attractive structure of a 
later date. 

This Hotel de Hollande has borne that name since, in 
the reign of Louis XIV., it was the seat of the embassy 
representing Holland at his court. This being officially 
Dutch soil, at that time, we may see Racine coming 
through this entrance-doorway, in full wig and court 
costume ; coming to present his son for introductions at 
The Hague, where the young man is to be a member of 
the French Embassy. We have seen the letters sent to 



THE WOMEN OE THE MARAIS 543 

him there by his thrifty father. There is another bit of 
history for us here. It was in this house that the firm 
" Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie " started in busi- 
ness in 1776, with a capital of 3,000,000 francs. The 
firm was composed of Caron de Beaumarchais, with 
the governments of France and Spain for his silent 
partners ; the former putting in 2,000,000 francs, and 
the latter the other million. The business of this house 
— and it did a lively business while it lasted — was to 
supply, secretly and unknown to the English officials in 
Paris, arms and equipments to the American colonies. 

Anne de Montmorenci, the great constable of France, 
in alliance, against the Huguenots, with the Guises, his 
near neighbors in the Marais, outfought Conde and 
Coligny at Saint-Denis in 1567, and died, of the wounds 
he got in that battle, " in his own hotel in Rue Saint- 
Avoie." So says the chronicle, and it tells us further 
that his was the grandest mansion in the town, with 
most extensive grounds ; far surpassing in size and 
magnificence the Hotels Lamoignon and Carnavalet. 
It was sufficiently spacious for the large-minded John 
Law, who established his bank in the building two 
centuries later. When the crash came, and he sought 
more modest quarters, the State took the building for 
its bureaux. Now, no stone of the structure can be 
found, the street from which it had entrance — Saint- 
Avoie — is merged in that portion of Rue du Temple 
which crosses Rue Rambuteau, and this broad thor- 
oughfare sweeps over the site of Montmorenci's palace 
and his gardens. 



544 THE STONES OF PARIS 

Turning from Rue Rambuteau into Rue du Temple, 
we are face to face, at No. 71, with a monumental gate- 
way, richly carved, giving entrance to an ample court. 
The stately walls surrounding this court have suffered 
much from time, and more from man. The old facade 
of this wing on our left is hidden behind a paltry new 
frontage for shops, and on the roof of the central body 
before us a contemptible top story has been put. The 
face of the original lofty attic, above the cornice, carried 
pilasters in continuation of those below, and these have 
been brutally mutilated by a line of low windows just 
over the cornice. For all that, there is a majesty in the 
stately arcades of these lower stories, and in the un- 
spoiled lower walls, up which climb graceful Corinthian 
pilasters from ground to cornice. They are similar to 
those of the Hotel Lamoignon, built before this Hotel 
de Saint-Aignan was transformed from a former 
structure by de Muet, who doubtless admired, perhaps 
unconsciously imitated, the best features of the earlier 
architecture. He has put, in this almost intact right 
wing, just such a stone staircase, of easy grade and no 
hand-rail, as that we have seen in the residence built for 
Diane de France. 

There is hardly any history to detain us here, and the 
great names that once resounded in this court make 
only far-away echoes now. Claude de Mesme, Comte 
d'Avaux, a diplomat of the seventeenth century, built 
this hotel. At his death, it came to the Due de Saint- 
Aignan, a royal Purveyor at the head of Louis XIV. 's 
Council of Finance. He was a relative of Madame de 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 545 



Scudery, wife of the Georges whom we have met in 
his sister's salon. Through his wife's influence with 
Saint-Aignan, Georges was presented to the King, and 
succeeded in obtaining a pension — useful to supplement 
such of his sister's earnings as came in his way. His 
merits, for which the royal bounty was granted, seem 
to have been of so momentous a literary character as to 
be pronounced equal to those of Corneille ! 

When Olivier de Clisson— Constable of France after 
the death of his comrade-in-arms, the mighty Dugues- 
celin— brought back Charles VI. victorious to Paris, 
after crushing the revolt in Ghent under Philip van 
Artavelde, he found the Marais du Temple fast being 
reclaimed and built upon. At one corner of the Tem- 
plars' former wood-yard, on a street to be named du 
Chaume, now merged in the southern end of Rue des 
Archives, opposite the end of Rue de Braque, was the 
fortress-home of his wife, Marguerite de Rohan, within 
the family enclosure. Here de Clisson made his head- 
quarters, giving his name to the hotel Its entrance, 
an ogival portal sunk beneath two impressive round 
turrets, built of different sizes through some vagary, 
still remains ; a most impressive relic, imbedded in more 
recent walls. 

It was de Clisson, who, quite without his consent, 
gave the King one of the several shocks which cul- 
minated in his madness. King and Constable had 
supped together in the royal apartment of the Hotel 
Saint-Paul, and the Constable went on his way home. 
Lighted by the main facts of the affair, we may easily 



546 



'THE STONES OF PARIS 




The Gateway of the Hotel de Chsson. 

track him. After crossing Rue Saint-Antoine and 
passing through one of the narrow lanes to Rue Neuve- 
Sainte- Catherine — now the eastern end of Rue des 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARA IS 547 

Francs-Bourgeois — he should have kept along this 
street to this new home of his. Perhaps the old soldier 
was not quite sure of his way, so soon after supper and 
the plentiful petit vin de I'hotel Saint-Paul, for he found 
himself beyond his corner, up in Rue Sainte-Catherine, 
now Rue Sevigne ; and there, in front of a baker's shop 
opposite the spot where now is the Carnavalet, he was 
set upon by a band of men led by Pierre de Craon, a 
crony of Louis d'Orleans. They left the tough old 
warrior in the baker's doorway, bleeding from many 
wounds, but not quite killed. The King was sum- 
moned, came hastily in scanty clothing, and it was long 
before he recovered from his affright. When he had 
rallied, he started out to punish the assailant of his 
favorite captain, and it was on his way to Brittany, with 
whose duke de Craon had taken refuge, that the King 
received the final blow to his reason. 

The history of the Hotel de Clisson would weary us, 
were it told in detail. We may jump to the year 1553, 
when it came to Anne d'Est, wife of Francois de Lor- 
raine, Due de Guise. Fie and his family were beginning 
to feel and to show their growing power, and he found 
these walls not wide enough for his swelling conse- 
quence. He bought the Hotels de Laval and de la 
Roche-Guyon, whose grounds adjoined his own; so 
adding to his estate, while others, following the ex- 
ample of Francois L, were cutting up and selling their 
Paris lands. Soon the Hotel de Guise was made up of 
several mansions, rebuilt and run together, within one 
enclosure, bounded by Rues de Paradis (now the west- 



548 THE STONES OF PARIS 

ern end of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois), du Chaume 
(now des Archives), des Quatre-Fils, and Vieille-du- 
Temple. The heirs of the last Guise, who died in 1671, 
sold this property at the end of the seventeenth century, 
and it came into the grasping hands of Madame de 
Soubise ; bought with the savings of the French peas- 
ants, squeezed from them by Louis XIV. 's farmers of 
taxes, and by him poured into the lap of this lady, one 
of the many ladies so turning an honest penny. Her 
complaisant husband, Frangois de Rohan, Prince de 
Soubise, began to tear down much of the old work, and 
to replace it by new work, in 1706. For thirty years 
he kept the most skilful artists and artisans of that day 
employed on the place within and without ; and he left 
the Hotel de Soubise much as we find it now. To him 
we owe this striking cour d'konneur, square with curved 
ends, and framed in a colonnade of coupled columns, 
that leads a covered gallery from the grand entrance 
around to the portal of the main building. This is his 
facade of three stories, with pediment, its columns both 
composite and Corinthian. For general effect this 
court has no parallel in Paris. 

A light elegant staircase, its ceiling delicately painted, 
leads to the first floor, whose rooms retain some of their 
mouldings, their wood-carvings, their decorated door- 
ways and ceilings. Gone, however, are the tapestries, 
" the most beautiful in the world and most esteemed in 
Christendom, after those of the Vatican," Sauval as- 
sures us. 

Vast and magnificent as was this palace, it did not 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 549 

suffice for the son of this prince, the Cardinal Armand 
Gaston de Rohan, Bishop of Strasburg, who, says 
Sauval, " was, in his prosperity, very insolent and 
blinded." On the site of the demolished Hotel de la 
Roche-Guyon he built for himself the Palais Cardinal, 
now commonly known as the Hotel de Strasbourg. 
The library, great and precious, which he there col- 
lected, together with his hotel and his blind insolence, 
came to his grand-nephew, the Cardinal de Rohan of 
the Diamond Necklace, the last cardinal of a family of 
cardinals. 

At his death, in 1803, desertion and emptiness came 
to the Hotel de Strasbourg, as they had already come 
to the Hotel de Soubise. The huge size of the build- 
ings rendered them unfit for private residences. At 
length they were taken for the State by the Emperor, at 
the urging of Daunou, Director of the Archives of 
France. By the decree of March 6, 1808, those archives 
took for their own the Hotel de Soubise, and the Hotel 
de Strasbourg was given to the Imprimerie Imperiale. 
No after-revolution nor any change of rulers has 
troubled them. As their contents grew, new structures 
have been added, over the gardens and on the street 
behind, all done in good taste, all suggesting the uses 
for which they are meant. The Imprimerie, entered 
from Rue Vieille-du-Temple, through a court contain- 
ing a statue of Gutenberg, does the work for the Senate 
and the Chamber of Deputies, for the Ministers and for 
the Institute. Its Bulletin des Lois, issued to all the 
Communes of France, carries to completion the mis- 



55° THE STONES OF PARIS 

sion meant for it when it was begun by Louis XIII. , 
Hugo asserts. 

The archives of France must be studied and may not 
be described. This amazing collection of manuscripts, 
charters, diplomas, letters, and autographs begins with 
the earliest day of writing and of records in France, and 
comes down through all the centuries. It is a spot for 
unhurried and unhindered browsing during long sum- 
mer days. 

Just in this region is to be seen, better than anywhere, 
an aspect of the Marais not yet seen in our historic 
strolling. It is the Marais of to-day and of every day, 
the work-a-day Marais, whose heart is here in this 
street of the Temple and the old street of the Temple. 
In them, and in the streets that cross them, are numer- 
ous mansions of a bygone time, with little to say to 
us in architecture, nothing at all to say to us in history 
or letters. Side by side with them are tall buildings and 
huge blocks of modern construction ; new and old held 
and possessed by factories, warehouses, show-rooms; 
their upper portions given over to strange handicrafts, 
strangely met together. The making of syphon-tops is 
next door on the same floor to the wiring of feathers, 
as Daudet discovered. These narrow streets between 
the buildings, and these walled-in courts within them, 
are hushed all through the working-hours, save for the 
ceaseless muffled rumble of the machinery, and the un- 
broken low murmur of the human toilers, both intent 
on their tasks. 

Suddenly at noon, these streets are all astir with an 



THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS 5 si 

industrial, unarmed mob, and the whole quarter is given 
over to an insurrection, peaceful and unoffending. 
These w^orkers are making their way to restaurant or 
rotisserie or cabaret; some of them saunter along, tak- 
ing their breakfast "" sur le pouce." The men, in stained 
blouses, are alert, earnest, and self-respecting ; the girls, 
direct of gaze, frank of manner, shrill of voice, wear 
enwrapping aprons, that fall from neck to ankle, and 
their hair, the glory of the French working-woman who 
goes hatless, is dressed with an artless art that would 
not dishonor a drawing-room. We can carry away 
with us, from these last scenes, no more captivating 
memory than this of the most modern woman of our 
Marais. 



INDEX 



Abbaye-aux-Bois, history and as- 
sociations of, 312, 313 
Mdme. Recamier's salon in, 

314,317 
Cordier, school of the Hugo 



brothers, 398 
Abbaye, Petit-Saint-Antoine, 38 
des Petits-Augustins, 399, 

400 

Port-Royal, 149, 167 

Saint - Germain - des - Pres, 

239, 398 
Sainte-Genevieve, 22, 32, 77 

et seq., 98, 100 
Saint- Martin of Tours, 18 



Abelard, Pierre, 75 e/ seq. 

Abrantes, Duchesse de (Laure 
Saint-Martin Permon), 257 

Alembert, Jean le Rond d', savant, 
201, 207, 213, 249 

Allieri, Victor, le comte, poet and 
adventurer, 240 

Amboise, Bussy d', scene of his 
murder, 377 

Amiel, quoted, 317 

Ancelot, Mdme., quoted, 415, 416 

Anne of Austria, 493, 507, 508 

of Brittany, 36; her Re- 
fectory of the Cordeliers still in- 
tact, 230 

wife of Charles VIII., 456 

wife of Louis XII., 457 



Arago, Dominique-Franfois, sa- 
vant, 27 



Arcueil, starting-point of Roman 
aqueduct, 21 et seq. 

Arena, the Roman, in Paris, 436 

Arouet (see Voltaire) 

Arsenal, the, built by Francois I., 
356, 460; its rooms decorated by 
Henri IV., 326; scene of Mdme. 
de Recamier's death, 319; its li- 
brary, 326, 364 

Artois, Robert, Comte d', 51, 53, 

55,59 
Assembly, the, its seat, 234 
"AtMnes, la Nouvelle,^' loi 
Aubriot, Hugues, Provost of Paris, 

builds the Bastille, 444; vestiges 

of his palace, 444 et seq. 
Aubry, Leonard, "Royal Paver 

and Street-Sweeper," 116 
Auteuil, 129, 132, 186, 215, 430, 435 
Avenue d'Eylau, 430 

Henri-Martin, 280 

d'lena, 339 

du Maine, 407 

de rObservatoire, 331 

de rOpera, 143, 199, 211, 

347, 447 

de Saint-Mande, 422 

Victor-Hugo, 430, 431 

de Vincennes, 205, 507 

Azay-le-Rideau, 460, 526 

Baif, Jean-Antoine, poet, 89 
Balzac, Honore de, 9, 47, 83, 84; 
date and place of birth, 323; 



553 



554 



INDEX 



Paris homes, 324, 325, 330, 331, 
339> 341, 351; studies law, 324, 
325; manner of life, 327, t,2>Z, 342, 
343; manner of work, 334 et seq.; 
appearance and costume, 337, 
338; debts, 329, 330, 2>Z3, 343» 
344; scenes and characters, 346- 
350; marriage and death, 351- 
355; his grave, 357; his mother, 
325, 352; his widow, 355, 356; 
mentioned, 294, 296, 298, 365, 
406, 409, 461, 520 

Banville, Theodore de, 67; bust in 
Luxembourg Gardens, 283 

Barbeau, Abbey of, 443 

Barras, Paul-Frangois-Jean-Nico- 
las, Comte de, 256, 263 

Barye, Antoine-Louis, visits Hugo, 
415; his home in the Marais, 

523 
Basoche, La, guild of players and 

playwrights, 64 
Bastille, the (see Prisons) 
Baziniere, Bertrand de la, 170, 232 
Beauharnais, Josephine de, 249- 
261, 263, 267 

Hortense de, 217, 263 

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Ca- 
ron de, 214-215; famous per- 
formances of his " Mariage de 
Figaro," 216; birthplace and 
homes of, 217 et seq.; in the 
Abbaye prison and his death, 218; 
cannon sent to America, 219; 
quoted, 512; his business house, 

543 

Beauvoir, Roger de, visited by Bal- 
zac, 344 

Bedford, Duke of. Regent of 
France, 453, 454 

Bejart, Armaude, wife and widow 
of Moliere, 117, 122 et seq., 129 

Genevieve, 109,117 



Bejart, Joseph, " I'Aine," 109, 116 

Louis, 117 

Madeleine, mother or sister 

of Armande, 109, 117, 122, 129 

Beranger, Pierre- Jean de, quoted, 
296; his songs, 308, 364; in 
prison, 307, 407; at Chateaubri- 
and's deathbed, 318; homes in 
Paris and Passy, 341, 419 

Berri, due de, assassination of, 402 

Berthault, architect of Malmaison 
and the Palais-Royal, 308 

BerthoUet, Claude-Louis, savant, 

253 

Bethune, Maximilien de (see Sully) 

Bibliotheque Nationale, its begin- 
ning, 454 

Sainte-Genevieve, 96 

Bievre, the river, 21, 27, 28, 43, 84, 
425, 426, 435 

Blanc, Louis, quoted, 246 

Blance, Louis, 8 

Blanche of Castile, " la reine 
Blanche," 27, 36, 105; her house, 
so-called, 27 e^ seq. 

Blois, d'Artagnan at, 391; Franfois 
I. at, 460; chateau, 524 

Boccaccio records Dante's stay in 
Paris, 83 

Boffrand, Germain, architect, 43 

Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 14, 16, 
75 etseq., 84, 107 et seq., 129 et 
seq., 141, 146 et seq., 150, 152, 
157, 159) 165, 167, 171, 175, 193, 
204; his characteristics, 178 et 
seq.; his birthplace, school, homes, 
181 e/ seq.; his burial in Saint- 
Chapelle, 189, 497, 520, 532 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 252, 253; his 
two sons, 261 et seq.; member of 
the Institute, 262; roofs that cov- 
ered him, 262; mentioned, 301, 
303> 304, 310. 3ii> 396, 398 



INDEX 



555 



Bonaparte, Caroline, marries Mu- 

rat, 309 
Lucien, admirer of Mdme. 

Recamier, 310; gives its name to 

Place des Vosges, 482 
Borget, Auguste, friend of Balzac, 

332 
Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, 14, 143 

et seq., 209 

Jacques-Benique, 293, 345 

Bottin, the Paris Directory, 8, 262, 

305, 331,342,386,418,420 
Boviillon, Duchesse de (Anne Man- 

cini), 167 et seq., 174, 178 
Boulanger, Louis, his portrait of 

Balzac, 334, 351 
Boulangerie generate des Hopitaux 

et Hospices, la, 41 et seq. 
Boulevard Arago, 27 
Beaumarchais, 217, 455, 

473, 495, 498 

Bourdon, 443 

des Capucines, 276, 311, 



312 



Diderot, 205 

Edgar-Quinet, 425 

Henri IV., 46, 325, 5^8 

de I'Hopital, 421 

Morland, 21, 443, 521 

de la Madeleine, 311 

Malesherbes, 373 

Pasteur, 425 

Poissonniere, 500 

Port-Royal, 239 

Raspail, 314, 382, 385 

Rochechouart, 98 

Saint-Germain, 2,Z^ 46, 151, 

204, 223, 229, 239, 253, 274, 275, 

306, 380, 385, 398, 401 

Saint- Jacques, 426 

Saint-Michel, 33, 89, 96, 



Bourgcgne, Charles, "/e Teme- 
raire,'' Due de, 61 et seq. 

Jean, " sans Peur,'' Due de, 

56 et seq.; his tower, 51, 69 et seq. 

Marguerite, Duchesse de,56 

Phihppe, " le Bon;' Due de, 



60 et seq., 66 

■Philippe, ''leHardi," Due 



150, 229, 246, 389 
Sebastopol, 437 



de, 55 e/ seq. 

Bourrienne, Louis- Antoine, 263 

Bourse, the, 347 

BrantSme, Pierre de Bourdeilles, 
Seigneur de, qvioted about mur- 
der of Bussy d'Amboise, 377; 
about Anne, daughter of Louis 
XL, 457; about Anne of Brittany, 
460; about Marguerite de Valois, 
526; about burial of Isabel of 
Bavaria, 540; about Diane de 
Poictiers, 540 

Brice, Germain, quoted, 294 

BrinvilHers, Marquise de, 116; her 
abode in the Marais, 513; her 
career, 514 et seq.; her torture and 
execution, 516; her portrait by 
Lebrun in the Louvre, 517 

Brissot, de Warville, Jean-Pierre, 
226 

Browning, Robert, and wife, visit 
George Sand, 299 

BuflFon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, 
Comte de, 249 

Bullant, Jean, builds Hotel Carna- 
valet, 486; his other work, 530 

Bulwer, E. L., quoted, 118 

Buonaparte, Napoleon, 80, 100, 
209; his night after 13 Vende- 
miaire, 257; his visits to the 
Hotel Guenegaud, 257 et seq.; 
his arrival at school in Paris 
from Brienne, 259; his later lodg- 
ings, 260 et seq.; drops u from 
name on marriage, 261 



556 



INDEX 



Butte des Moulins, la, 447 

Buzot, Franfois-Leonard-Nicolas, 

170; lover of Mdme. Roland, 244; 

his lodgings, 245 ; death, 248 

Cafe Procope, 122; resort of Rev- 
olutionary pen-men, 201 et seq. 

Cafe de la Regence, resort of Roy- 
alists, 202 

Cagliostro, Comte de (Giuseppe 
Balsamo), 266 

Calvin, John, student in Paris, 44, 

90, 93 
Candide, his entrance into Paris, 41 
Caritat (see Condorcet) 
Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 2, 207, 

236, 365; on Talma's acting, 269 
Carrier-Belleuse, sculptor, 419 
Catherine de' Medici, 2,3, 42,91, 376 
Celestins (see Monastery) 
Cemetery des Augustins, 45 
des Innocents, 30, 49, 136, 

173, 217 

Mont Parnasse, 403, 425 

Pere Lachaise, 77, 136, 173, 



218, 288, 327, 356,357, 518 

Picpus, 423, 424 

Saint- Joseph, 135 eiseq., 173 

Saint-Paul, 402, 502, 504 

Vaugirard, 425 



Cerceau, Baptistedu, his house, 91 

Jacques-Androuet du, the 

Huguenot, 91 
Chaillot, 47, 243, 339, 345, 438, 502 
Chamber of Deputies, 276, 277, 361 
Champeaux, Guillaume de, Abe- 
lard's master, 77 
Champmesle, Marie la, 161 et seq. 
Champs- Elysees, 302, 409 
Chantilly, 108, 128 
Chapelle, Claude Emmanuel, the 
friend of Boileau and Moliere, 
131, 179, 185 



Chapelle, Saint-Ben6it-le-Betourne, 

84, 86 

Sainte, 15, 23, 181, 182, 189 

Charlemagne, statue of, 19 
Charles II., "/e Chauve," 31 
v., " le Sage," i, 4, 51, 55 et 

seq. 



v., the Emperor, 62 

v., " the Wise," first dau- 
phin of France, 439; his abode in 
the Marais, 440; his wa^ about 
Paris, 441 et seq., 447 et seq., 479, 
499; his Hotel Saint-Paul, 450, 
451, 504, 523; his library, 454; 
referred to, 273, 506, 520 
VI.,"theSilly,"25, 56, 64, 



153; his abode in the Marais, 

451-453, 539, 545 

VII., 59 et seq.; gives to 



Parliament the Old Palace, 440; 

comes to the throne, 452; his 

abode in the Marais, 454 

VIII., 36; enters Paris, 456 

IX., 80, 88; orders destruc- 



tion of Hotel des Tournelles, 
463 

X. appoints ChS,teaubriand 

to Rome, 305; sends Beranger to 
prison, 364; patron of Hugo, 418 

Chariot, Claude, cuts streets in the 
Marais, 479 

Chateaubriand, Frangois-Auguste, 
Comte de, 9; on Talma's acting, 
268; first visits Paris, 300; goes 
to America, 301; starves in Lon- 
don, 302; returns to France, 302; 
his literary work, 302, 303, 305; 
his political work, 304, 305; his 
memoirs, 305, 317; his homes in 
Paris, 300, 305 et seq.; intimacy 
with Mdme. de Recamier. 314; 
his appearance, 317; his last 
dwelling and death, 315 ef seq.; 



INDEX 



557 



referred to, 275, 277, 292, 332, 
Z^^i^ 367, 401,402 

Chateau Gaillard, 30 

Chateaux (see Palais) 

Chatelet, M. et Mdme. du, 198 et 
seq. 

le grand, 31, 116, 139, 240 

le petit, 31, 80, 240 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 85 

Chenier, Andre-Marie, de, his home, 
240; his verse, 241 ; arrest and ex- 
ecution, 241 

Joseph-Marie, de, 240, 263; 

author of words of "Le Chant du 
Depart" 242; the herald of Ro- 
manticism, 363; his grave in Pic- 
pus, 424 

Chevreuse, Marie de Rohan, Duch- 
esse de, 150 et seq.; her hotel, 115; 
her role in history and in Dumas, 

385, 386 
Chimaera, statue of, 97 
Chinon, 85 

Church des Blancs-Manteaux, 541 
des Carmes - Dechausses, 

381 

des Innocents, 50 

de la Madeleine, 275, 311 

des Missions - Etrangeres, 

315, 319 
Notre-Dame, 15, 19, 27,30, 



46, 61, 75, 76, 188, 189, 234, 375, 
453, 455, 517, 525, 540; cloisters 
of, 76, 188, 189 

Oratoire, 54 

Pantheon, 2,3, 78, loi, 196, 



206, 214, 216, 229 
Saint-Andre des Arts, 158, 



193 



379 



Saint- Benott - le - Betourne, 

Saint-Cosme, 246 
Saint-Denis, 18 



Church, Saint - Etienne - du-Mont, 

98, 167 
Saint - Eustache, 44, 106, 

IIS, 126, 134, 13s, 427 

Saint-Gatien of Tours, 323 

Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, 



24, 115, 117, 124, 126, 519 
Saint - Germain - des - Pres, 



93, loi, 190,239, 260 
Saint-Gervais, 48, 91, 485, 



504, 506 
Saint- Jacques- de-la-Bou- 



cherie, 97 
Saint- Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, 



97, 293, 395 

Saint- Julien-le-Pauvre, 82 

Saint-Leu, 427 

Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile, 46, 158 

Sainte-Marie, 501 

Saint- Nicolas- des- Champs, 



485 



Saint-Nicolas-du - Chardon- 

net, 44, 45 
Saint - Paul-et-Saint-Louis, 



175, 215, 234, 418, 445, 485, 504 
Saint - Philippe - du - Roule, 



356, 409 
Saint-Roch, 48, 115, 132, 



143, 209, 210, 256, 347, 447 

Saint-Severin, 82, 83, 159 

Saint-Sulpice, 160, 163, 167, 



185, 226, 387, 403, 404 
Val-de-Grace, 421 



Cicero, quoted, 15 
Cinq-Mars, execution of, 109 
Cite, la, 20, 30, 32, 36, 54, 79 
City, Island of the (see lie) 
Claguy, Abbe de, designed Foun- 
tain of the Innocents, 50 
Clairon, Hippolyte, her dwellings, 
160 et seq., 164, 213; visited by 
Voltaire, 200 
Clarke, Mary (see Madame Mohl) 



558 



INDEX 



Clement, Jacques, executioner of 

Henri III., 92 
Clisson, Olivier de, Constable of 

France, his abode in the Marais, 

• 545 

Cloisters (see Notre-Dame) 

'''Clopinel,'' nickname of Jean de 
Meung, 85 

Clouet, Frangois, portrait of Mar- 
guerite of Valois, 526 

Clovis, 78 

Cluny, gardens of the, 389, 436, 498 

Coictier, Dr., physician of Louis 
XI., 35; his tower, 455 

Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 5, 43 e/ seq., 
141 et seq., 152, 205, 232, 240; his 
residence, 308; referred to, 331, 
493, 516 

College de Bossuet, 294 

du Cardinal Lemoine, now 

Seminaire Saint - Nicolas - du- 
Chardonnet, 44, 45, 93 

de Clermont, 107 

de France, 83, 95, 108, 282, 



285, 294, 295, 324, 399 

d'Harcourt, 149, 182, 204 

Mazarin (see College des 



Quatre Nations) 

Montaigu, 95, 96 

de Navarre, now Ecole 



Poly technique, 88, 249 
des Quatre Nations, 78, 



121, 170 

RoUin, 98, 285, 421 

Royale, 95 

Comedie Frangaise, la, 366, 406 
Commission du Vieux Paris, 7 
Comte, Auguste, his abode, 289 
Conde, the Great, his town-house, 

108, 1S7; at Chantilly, 108, 174, 

498 
Condor cet, Marie - Jean - Antoine- 

Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de, his 



statue, 249; associated with 
Thomas Paine, 250; his hiding- 
place and escape, 250 et seq.; his 
suicide, 252; his widow, 252 e/ 
seq.; his dwelling, 266 
Conjrerie de la Passion, guild of 

players, 64 
Congreve, William, 197 
Conti, Prince de, school friend of 

Moliere, 108, 170, 187 
Convent, Augustines Anglaises, 297 

des Grands Augustins, 45 

des Petits Augustins, 135, 

173, 190 

des Bernardius, 45 

des Carmelites, 239, 251 

de Chaillot, 47 



des Celestins, 52 

des Cordeliers, 229-230 

des Dames-de-la-Congrega- 

tion, 244 

des Feuillants, 234 

des Jacobins, 234 

les Religieuses -de - Picpus, 



422, 424 
Sainte - Catherine - du - Val- 



des-EcoHers, 63, 442, 539 
Sainte-Madeleine, 502 



Convention, the, its seat, 234, 250, 

256 
Conway, Moncure D., 209 
Cook, Theodore Andrea, quoted, 3 
Coppee, Francois, quoted, 14, 107 
Coquelin, sued by la Comedie 

Franfaise, 266 
Corday, d'Armans, Marie - Anne- 
Charlotte, 227, 247; her inn in 
Paris, 367 
Cordeliers Club, 230 et seq. 
Corneille, Pierre, 68, 107, no, 117, 
129, 153, 179, 209, 240; quoted, 
47, 148; statue at Rouen, 138; 
dwellings, 139, 142 et seq.; grave 



INDEX 



559 



and tablet in Saint-Roch, 143; 
collaborates with Moliere, 140; 
his theatre, 144; appearance and 
character, 147 et seq.; his Men- 
/ewr, 345, 475; in Winon's salon, 
497 

Thomas, 139, 142, 144, 149 



Cour du Commerce, 34, 223, 224, 
228, 231 

du Dragon, 182, 398, 403 

des Femmes, 240 

de Rohan, 34 

d' Orleans, 299 

du Palais, 182, 183, 193 

Cours-la-Reine, 429 

Cousin, Jean, worker in stained 
glass, 48, 90; his abode, 329 

Victor, 281, 324 

Crebillon, Claude - Prosper - Jolyot 
de (the younger), 107; his dwell- 
ing in the Marais, 492 

Crusade, the Sixth, 51 

Cuvier, Georges-Leopold-Chretien- 
Frederick-Dagobert, Baron, his 
dwellings, 255 et seq. 

Dablin, early friend of Balzac, 

352 

Dagobert, 17; his tower and stair- 
case, 2^ et seq. 

Dante, in Paris, 82 et seq.; statue, S^ 

Danton, Georges- Jacques, 231, 242, 
263; dwelling, 224 et seq.; statue, 
224 

Daudet, Alphonse, quoted, 294, 
415, 550; scene from Les Rois en 
Exit, 504; his homes in Paris, 

533, 534 

■ Madame, 534 

David d'Angers, his bust of Balzac, 

355 
— Jacques- Louis, 240, 242, 

263 



Delacroix, Ferdinand - Victor - Eu- 
gene, at Hugo's, 415 

Delavigne, Casimir, his grave, 357; 
librarian of Palais-Royal, 363 

Delorme, Marion, her abode in the 
Marais, 410; a scene in her salon, 
411; her pretended death, 412 

Philibert, architect, 76 

DeQuincey, Thomas, quoted, 388 

Descartes, Rene, 14; residence in 
Paris, 100; his portrait by Franz 
Hals, loi; in Marion Delorme's 
salon, 411 

Deschamps, Evistace, praises Chau- 
cer, 85 

Desmoulins, Camille, quoted, 414 

Lucie - Simplice - Camille- 

Benoist, 237, 263; his homes, 224 
et seq.; his marriage, 226; his 
widow's death, 227 

Despreaux (see Boileau) 

Diana of Poictiers, her grip on 
Henri II., 461; her dwellings in 
the Marais, 461, 540 

Diane de France, sketch of, 531; 
her hotel in the Marais, 531, 544 

Dickens, Charles, visits George 
Sand, 299; visits Victor Hugo, 
417; referred to, 336, 350 

Diderot, Denis, 164, 201, 250; 
sketched, 203 et seq.; bust by 
Houdon, 204; his homes, 204 et 
seq.; in Vincennes prison, 205; 
his Encyclopaedia, 207; his grave 
near Corneille's, 209 

Dolet, Etienne, " Martyr of the 
Renaissance," 94 

Dowden, Professor, quoted, 284 

Dryden, John, quoted, 133 

Du Cerceau {les or les Androuet), 
Baptiste (ist son of Jacques I.), 
his dwelling in Paris, 329; in ex- 
ile, 468; begins Pont-Neuf, 468 



560 



INDEX 



Du Cerceau, Jacques-Androuet, the 
Huguenot founder of the family, 
468; his only work left in Paris, 
468; decorates the Hotel Carna- 
valet, 486 

Jacques II. (2d son of 

Jacques I.), 468 

Jean (son of Baptiste), ar- 



chitect of Hotel de Bethune, 465; 
plans Place Royale, 468; finishes 
Pont-Neuf, 468 

Dudevant, Mdme. (see George 
Sand) 

Dumas, Alexandre, comes to Paris, 
361; clerk for Due d' Orleans, 
362; growth of the Romantic 
movement, 362-366; his inter- 
view with the dying Talma, 366; 
his recognition of his natural son, 
368; life-long affection of son and 
father, 368, 371, 372; his manner 
of work, 369-372; scenes and 
characters, 375 et seq.; life and 
homes, 367, 368, 371 et seq.; his 
death and burial, 374; monument 
to, 104; appearance of, 374; re- 
ferred to, 297, 298, 306, 335, 356, 
412, 415, 472, 498, 503, 521 

Dunois, Jean, bastard of Louis 
d'Orleans, 33, 59 

Dupanloup, Felix - Antoine - Phili- 
bert, Bishop of Orleans, 44 

Duplay, Maurice, and his family, 
235 e^ seq. 

EcoLE DES Beaux-Arts, 135, 170, 
290, 399 

de Medecine, 78, 80 

Militaire, 257, 259 

Poly technique, 88, 249 

— — — de Saint-Cyr, 159 

Superieure de Guerre, 259 

Empire, the, 261 



Empire, the Second, 7, 20, 22, 37, 
108, 125, 130, 262, 279, 282, 284, 
286, 287, 388, 290, 294, 340, 399, 
408, 420, 429, 505 

" Encore un Tableau de Paris," by 
Henrion, 6 

" Enfants sans Souci, les," a band of 
players, 64, 88 

Erasmus, 66; in Paris, 94, 95 

Estrees, Gabrielle d', scene of her 
death, 519 

Faubourg, Saint- Antoine, 422 

Saint-Germain, 100, 116, 

169, 273, 274, 275, 279, 280, 289, 

300, 347» 385,481, 514, 534 
Saint-Honore, 276, 481 



Fenelon, Francois de Salignac de 

La Mothe, 166, 293 
Feuillan tines, convent of, 125, 127, 

395, 397 
Feuillan ts, passage des, 234; ter- 

rasse des, 234 
Feuillet, Octave, librarian of the 

Institute, 282 
Flaubert, Gustave, visits Daudet, 

533 
Fontainebleau, 43, 115, 123, 165, 

252, 291, 346, 460, 470 
Fontenay-aux-Roses, 239 
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 

sketches Corneille, 147 
Fouche, Joseph, Duke of Otranto, 

310 
Foucher, Adele, her childhood with 

Victor Hugo, 400, 403; her mar 

riage with him, 404 
Fountain of the Innocents, 50, 173 
Fouquet, Nicolas, patron of Lebrun, 

43; patron of Moliere, 174; in 

prison, 345; his friendship with 

Mdme. de Sevigne, 488; patron 

of La Fontaine, 167, 507 



INDEX 



561 



Fournier, Edouard, topographer, 

154 
Foy, General, the liberal statesman, 

361, 362 
Francois I., i, 43, 62, 65, 68, 90, 94, 

95; builds Louvre, 375; "/o mai- 

son de," 429; his court in the 

Marais, 459, 463; referred to, 

349, 384, 458, 476, 531, 535, 541, 

547 
Franklin, Benjamin, 202, 213, 249, 

251; his residences in Paris and 

Passy, 214 et seq. 
Fremiet, Emmanuel, his statue of 

Louis d' Orleans, 57 
Froissart, Jean, quoted, 441, 442 
Fulbert, Canon of Notre-Dame, 75 

ei seq. 

Gambetta, L£on, at the Cafe Pro- 
cope, 202; his house at Villa 
d'Avray, 339; his statue in Paris, 

347 

Garibaldi, " Dictator of Sicily," 373 

Garrick, David, in Paris, 164 

Gautier, Theophile, 141, 341, 344, 
346, 353, 363, 415 

Gavarni,Sulpice-Guillaume, Cheva- 
lier, 346 

" Geneve, la petite" the Huguenot 
quarter, 90, 91, 94 

Giac, Pierre de, his hStel in the 
Marais, 446 

Gillot, Jacques, Canon of Sainte- 
Chapelle, 182 

Girardin, Delphine Gay de, 337 

Emile de, t,t,6 

Giraud, Eugene, his portrait of Bal- 
zac dead, 355 

Gobelins, les, 41 et seq.; founder of 
the factory, 29 

Goethe, bored by Mdme. de Stael, 
303; quoted, 363, 410 



Goldsmith, Oliver, 176; his transla- 
tion of the "Roman Comique," 
490 

Goncourt, Edmond de, quoted, 
283, 292, 295 

Gondi, Paul de. Cardinal de Retz, 
his last years in Paris, 520 

Goujon, Jean, his Naiads, 50; his 
work in the Hotel Carnavalet, 
486; his murder, 487; his work on 
old Porte Saint-Antoine, 498 

Gozlan, Leon, his walks with Bal- 
zac, 336 

Crenelle, 435 

Grimm, Frederick-Melchior, Baron 
de, 201, 203, 205, 208 

Gringoire, Pierre, his plays, 66 et 
seq., 87 

Gros, Antoine-Jean, his studio, 121 
et seq. 

Grotius, Hugo, in Marion De- 
lorme's salon, 1 1 

Guillotin, Joseph-Ignace, Dr., per- 
fects the guillotine, 231; his resi- 
dence, 232 

Guillotine, La, first set up and 
named, 231 et seq.; various sites 
of, 232 et seq. 

Guise, Due de, 88, 232 

Guizot, Franfois-Pierre-Guillaume, 
quoted, 148; career and homes, 
275 et seq.; referred to, 281, 285 
287, 324, 364 

Halles, the, 48, 67, io6 et seq., 260, 

427, 436, 437 
Hals, Franz, portrait of Descartes, 

lOI 

Haussman, Baron, sweeps away old 

Paris, 346 
Heine, Heinrich, quoted, 416 
Heloise, 75 et seq. 
Henley, W. E., quoted, 87 



562 



INDEX 



Henri II., 4; his home in the Tour- 
nelles, 376, 461; his daughters, 
461, 531; his mistress, 461, 540; 
his wound and death, 463 

III., 88, 91, 92, 230, 232, 

377, 378, 472, 501, 531 
IV., 4, 21, 24, 33 et seq., 46, 



48, 68, 79, 91, 92, 106, 158, 169, 
182; visits Sully in the Arsenal, 
326; scene of his marriage, 
375; his likeness to d'Artagnan, 
387; his dining-hour, 458; his 
statue on Pont-Neuf, 463; re- 
builds the Marais, 464 et seq., 467; 
gives ground to Sully, 464; plans 
and begins Place Royale, 467, 
469 et seq.; punishes Due de Ma- 
yenne, 469; his two wives, 471; 
referred to, 366, 381, 479, 505, 

525, 527, 531 

Henrietta of France, widow of 
Charles I. of England, 508 

Anne of England, 508 

Herold, Louis- Joseph-Ferdinand, 
musician, 367 

Hervart, Berthelemy d'. La Fon- 
taine's host, 172 et seq. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, quoted, 
197 

Hopital de la Maternite, 238 

de la Salpetrihe, 21, 238 

Hotel, d'Angouleme, 530 

d'Antin, 226 

d'Artois (later de Bour- 

gogne), 51, 63, 69 

d'Aubray, 513, 514, 516 

d'Aumont, 511, 513 

Barbette, 53, 57, 536 et seq.. 



540, 541 

■ de Beauvais, 9, 507 et seq. 

de Bethune, 465 et seq. 

de Boissy, 377, 501 

de Bouillon, 170 



Hotel, de Bourgogne, 51, 61 et seq , 

107, 264 

de Bretagne, 232 

Carnavalet, 485, 500, 543, 

547 



de Chalons et de Luxem- 
bourg, 510 
de la Chancellerie d' Or- 



leans, 127 

de Chaulnes, 467 

de Choiseul-Praslin, 130 

Clermont-Tonnerre, 32 

de Clisson, 545, 547 

de Cluny, 34 

de Coislin, 304 

Dieu, 26, 30, 78, 80, 82, 243 

d'Effiat, 412 

de I'Eperon, 172 

d'Estomenil, 523 

d'Etampes, 440 

de Flandre, 56, 65, 172 

Flavacourt, 286 

de Guemenee, 410 

Guenegaud, 187 

Petit, 257 

de Guise, 138, 547 

de Hollande, 217, 542 

Jeanne d'Albret, 535 

Lambert, 19S, 199 

Lamoignon, 187, 530, 532, 



533, 543, 544 
de Lauzun-Pimodan, 344- 



346 



Lavalette (formerly Fieu- 
bet), 522 
des Lesdiguieres, 187, 518- 



520 



de Leveau, 246 

de Luynes, 150, 151; (the 

new), 151, 153, 275,385 

de Mayenne, 469 

delaMonnaie, 187, 249, 259 

Montmorenci, 543 



INDEX 



563 



Hotel, de Navarre, 34, 35 

de Nesle, 95 

de Pisani, 124 

du Prev6t, 544-547 

de Rambouillet, 108, 124, 

171,474,475,476,495. 535 
de Ranes, 160 

de la Reine Blanche, 27 «f 



seq. 

de la Rochefoucauld, 400 

du Roi-de-Sicile, 408, 530 

Saint-Aignan, 544 

Saint-Paul, 57, 450 et seq., 

454, 459, 461, 468, 504, 505, 510, 

518, 522, 539, 540, 545 

Sale (or Juigne), 145 

de Sens, 446, 523 et seq., 



528, 529 

de Sillery, 257 

de Soubise, 548, 549 

de Sourdis, 519 

de Strasbourg, 549 

de Toulouse, 397, 398, 400, 



403, 404 

des Tournelles, 61 

de la Tremouille, 380 

de Treville, 379, 382, 391 

des Ursius, 20, 153 et seq. 

de Valentinois, 215 

de Vieuville, 523 

de Ville, 40, 48, 132, 277, 



487, 505, 506, 532 
Hotels- garnis, 8 et seq., 177, 206, 

227, 229, 233, 256 et seq., 260 et 

seq. 
Hotel-garni du Blois, 361 

de Cherbourg, 301 

de I'Europe, 301 

de France et de Lorraine, 



300 



Grand, 311 

de Picardie, 388 

Saint-Quentin, 348 



H6tel, du Senat, 534 

Houssaye, Arsene, 346 

Hugo, Abel, 401 

Eugene, 395 

General, 376, 378, 427 

Victor, I, 36, 66, 67, 141, 

255; his first home in Paris, 395; 
his later homes, 332, 397 et seq., 
403, 405, 409, 410, 418, 430; at 
school, 376, 378, 379; death of his 
mother, 403; his marriage, 404; 
pensioned by Louis XVIII., 404, 
405; his friends, 404, 406, 413 et 
seq.; visits Chateaubriand, 401; 
visits Beranger in prison, 407; 
visited by Lamartine, 402; by 
Charles Dickens, 417; in exile, 
420; returns to Paris, 429; his 
death and burial, 431; his scenes 
and characters, 407, 409, 418, 420 
etseq.; quoted on Balzac's burial, 
353-357; referred to, 279, 282, 
284, 298, 306, 335, 363, 390, 473, 
479, 548; his " Notre-Dame de 
Paris," 41, 182 

Huguenot quarter, 90 et seq. 

Humboldt, Alexander, residence in 
Paris, 170 

Huyghens, Christiaan, at Ninon's, 
497 

Ile, de la Cite, 15, 32, 75, 76, 78, 
84, 96, 153, 182, 234, 389, 435, 
440, 455, 464, 506 

de France, 378 

des Javiaux, 443 

des Javiaux, later Louvier, 

21, 45, 46, 54, 76, 157, 199, 443 

Notre-Dame, 21, 54 

Saint-Louis, 21, 45 et seq., 



54, 76, 157, 199, 344, 345 
aux Vaches, 21, 54 



Impasse Conti, 259 



564 



INDEX 



Impasse, de Nevers, 34 
Innocents, Fountain of the, 50, 173 

Square of the, 50 

Institute, the, 32,9s, 121, 162, 170, 
• 196,259,262,274,282,290,420 
Institution Hospitaheres de la 

Place-Royale, 493 
des Jeunes-Filles-Aveugles, 



306 



130 



■ National des Sourds-Muets, 
- Saint - Thomas d' Aquinas, 



Invalides, the, 263, 342, 494 

Esplanade of, 2 74 

Isabelle of Bavaria, shameless wife 
of Charles VI., 451; her un- 
clean court, 57, 539; her last 
years, death, burial, 539, 540 

Issy, Queen Margot's lodge at, 293, 
527 

Jacobins, Club of the, 230 ei seq., 
234, 246 

James, Henry, quoted, 19, 296, 348 

Janin, Jules, prince of critics, 289, 
325; quoted, 292, 489 

Jardin des Plantes (formerly du 
Roi), 238, 255, 285, 301, 421 

Jean, "le Bon," 55,439 

Joan, the Maid, 210; place where 
wounded, 447; brings Charles 
VII. to his throne, 454; her burn- 
ing, 454, 539 

JuHan, the Apostate, his love of Lu- 
tetia, 436 

Junot, Andoche, Due d'Abrantes, 
257, 263 

Karr, Alphonse, 410, 419 

Labienus, Cassar's lieutenant, 435 
La Bruyere, Jean de, sketches La 
Fontaine, 176 



Lafayette, Marie- Jean-Paul Roch 
Yves Gilbert Motier, Marquis de, 
his grave at Picpus, 424; sends 
key of the Bastille to Washington, 

SOI 

Louise de, flees from Louis 

XIII., 501 

La Fontaine, Jean de, 108, 115, 
129, 135 et seq,, 150-153, 162, 
179, 184; his early visits to 
Paris, 167; his homes in Paris, 
167, 170, 172; his burial andfinal 
sepulture, 173 

La Harpe, Jean-Franjois, quoted, 

157 

Lamartine, Alphonse de, Marie- 
Louis de Prat de, his poems and 
politics, 7 ei seq., 363; his homes 
in Paris, 279, 280; quoted, 209, 
227, 233, 250, 317, 402, 414 

LambaUe, Princesse de, spot of her 
assassination, 408, 530 

Lamoignon, Chretien-Frangois de, 
his dwelling and his friends 

532 

Lang, Andrew, quoted, 89 

Laplace, Pierre-Simon, his dwell- 
ings, 253 ei seq., 294 

La Rochefoucauld, Frangois de, 

497 
Latin Mountain, the, 273 
Latin Quarter, the (see Pays Latin) 
Lauzun, Antonin Nompar de Cau- 

mont. Due de, his hotel and 

career, 345 
Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, savant, 

240, 253 
League, the, 34, 92, 379, 469 
Lebrun, Charles, painter, his home, 

43; his official residence, 44, 474, 

495.507, 512, 517 
Leconte de Lisle, Charles-Marie- 
Rene, his bust, 283 



INDEX 



565 



Lecouvreur, Adrienne, g, 195, 196, 
200,214; her residence, 160 etseq.; 
her place of burial, 163 

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 348 

Lemoine, Jean, Cardinal, 45 

Lenclos, Ninon de, 174, 194, 197; 
befriends Scarron and his widow, 
49 1 > 535; her dwelling and its 
frequenters, 494 et seq. 

Lenoir, Marie-Alexandre, founder 
of the Musee des Monuments- 
Fran(;ais, 135 

Lenotre, Gosselin, 10; his "Paris 
Revolutionnaire," 223, 260, 332 

Lepautre, Antoine, architect, 508 

Le Sage, Alain-Rene, at Cafe Pro- 
cope, 202 

Lescot, Pierre, 50, 76; plans western 
wing of the Louvre, 460; designs 
Hotel Carnavalet, 486 

Lesurques, Joseph, executed for 
crime of Dubosc, 529 

Library, Arsenal, 319, 326, 364, 
415. 461, 520-522 

Hotel de Ville, 532 

of Mazarin, 282 

Palais-Royal, 363 

Linnaeus, Carolus, 349 

Lister, Dr. Martin, English travel- 
ler, 477, 5i3 

Littre, Maximilien-Paul-Emile, his 
career and homes, 288, 289 

Locker-Lampson, Frederick, quot- 
ed on Lamartine, 279 

Longfellow, H. W., quoted, 83 

Lorris, Guillaume de, began " Le 
Roman de la Rose," 85 

Louis VI., "/e Gros" his wall and 
towers, 30 et seq., 50, 116 

VII. gives land to the Tem- 
plars, 449 

VIII., " le Lion;' 36 

IX. (Saint-Louis), 24, 36, 



41, 52, 84, 230; " maison dtte de,^^ 
2 7 e/ seq. 
XL, 35, 61, 66, 67, 87; 



camps in the Tournelles, 455 et 
seq., 504 
XII., referred to, 23, 34, 67, 



93; lives in Old Palace, 440; in 
the Tournelles, 457; marries Anne 
of Brittany, 457; marries Mary of 
England, and dies, 458, 459; his 
prophecy about Francois I., 459; 
his monument to Louis of Or- 
leans, 541 
XIII. , referred to, 5, 46, 47, 



63, 68, 138, 238, 474, 512, 528; 
partly levels Paris walls, 448; 
ruled by Richelieu, 47 1 ; his statue 
in Place Royale, 472; his pursuit 
of Mile, de Lafayette, 501 
XIV., referred to, 5, 32, 43 



117, 150, 179, 181, 211, 216, 232, 
3", 315, 33'^^ 339, 408, 448, 
474, 487, 490, 494, 503, 506, 514, 
542, 548 
XV., referred to, 41, 234, 



259, 397 
XVI., referred to, 31, 216; 



exact spot of his execution, 233, 

499, 521 
^ XVIII. , referred to, 305, 



404, 405, 415, 521 
Louis-Phillipe, referred to, 7, 125, 
242, 276, 307, 346, 351, 364, 369, 

413, 417, 418, 473, 505 
Louis of Orleans, institutes order of 
Pore-Epic, 347; scene of his as- 
sassination, 536, 542; his grave 
and monument, 541, 547; his inti- 
macy with Isabelle of Bavaria, 

539 
Louvois, Franfois-Michel le Tel- 

lier. Marquis de, 44, 141 
Louvre, the (see Palais) 



566 



INDEX 



Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 300 
LuUi, Jean-Baptiste, 119; his hotel, 

140 
Lutetia, the Gallo-Roman town, 20, 

30, 435. 436 
Luther, Martin, go 
Luynes, Due de, 150 et seq. 
Luxembourg (see Palais) 
Gardens, 283, 287, 289, 

380, 382, 386, 389, 403, 436 
Lycee Buffon, 425 

Charlemagne, 285, 444 

Fenelon, 158 

Henri IV., 22, 78 

Louis-le-Grand, 107, 108, 

193, 226, 288, 399 
Saint-Louis, 150, 230 



house for himself, 493 ; architect 
of Temple Sainte-Marie, 501; 
and of Hotel d'Aumont, 511 

Jules Hardouin, 43, 205; 



Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 
8 

Maintenon, Mdme. de (Franjoise 
d'Aubigne), 159, 166, 194; wife 
of Paul Scarron, 391, 490; his 
widow, 492, 493, 507, 535; her 
marriage with Louis XIV., 391; 
her home in the Marais, 536 

^' Maison de la Reine Blanche," 27 
et seq. 

Maistre, Joseph de, quoted, 453 

Malesherbes, Chretien-Guillaume, 
befriends Chateaubriand, 301 

Malherbe, Frangois de, 125 

Malmaison, chateau of, 308 

Man in the Iron Mask, identified, 
503; his grave, 502 

Mancini, Anne, Duchesse de Bouil- 
lon, 167 e/ seq. 

— — — Hortense, 345 

Manage, le, its site, 234 

Mansart, Francois, 171, 259; builds 
Pont Royal, 315; builds Hotel de 
Lauzun-Pimodan, 345; restores 
Hotel Carnavalet, 486; builds 



his architectural work, 494, 522 
Marais, the, referred to, 46, 68, 107 
115. 194, 240, 324, 326, 390, 410, 
412, 418, 428, 475; a historic 
swamp, 435; its ancient roads, 
436, 437; cultivation of, 438; its 
walls, 438, 441 et seq., 448; its 
temple, 449 et seq.; its arsenal, 
326, 520; its notable mansions, 
45°. 453 ei seq., 465, 469, 473, 
486, 493, 508, 510, 513, 519, 522, 
524, 53°. 535. 537, 542, 544, 545; 
Rabelais in, 461; tournaments 
in, 462 et seq.; famous duels in, 
473; beautified by Henri IV., 463 
et seq.; its relics of past grandeur, 
480; its convents and monasteries, 
478, 479, 486; Scarron in, 490; 
Daudet in, 504; famous women 
of, 477 et seq., 485 et seq., 490, 
494, 5oi> 508, 513, 518, 523, 531, 
534, 536, 539. 540, 548 
Marat, Jean-Paul, his dwelling, 
227; baignoire in which assassi- 
nated, 228; his printing-ofiice, 
228; in and out of the Pantheon, 
229; his age, 237 
Marcel, Etienne, his statue, 48; 
a demigod of democracy, 439; 
Froissart on his death, 441; and 
on his wall, 442 
Marche des Enfants-Rouges, 475 

Saint-Germain, 184 

Saint-Honore, 144, 234 

Marcus Aurelius compared with 

Saint-Louis, 36 
Marguerite de Navarre, 90, 94; her 
home in Paris, 429; founds char- 
ity of Enfants-Rouges, 476 



INDEX 



567 



Marguerite de Navarre, Valois 
("Margot"), 169; her pavilion, 
267; her role in Dumas, 375, 
377; her chapel and grounds, 399, 
400; girlhood in the Tournelles, 
461; home in the Marais, 556; 
her later homes, 557 

Marie de' Medici, 46; finishes Place 
Roy ale, 470; her festival there, 
471; befriends Marguerite de 
Valois, 527; her death in exile, 
472 

Marmontel, Jean- Francois, 164, 
201 

Marot, Clement, 14, 89 et seq., 93, 

94 

Mattioli, Ercole-Antonio, the Man 
in the Iron Mask, 503 

Mayenne, Due de, 92; his hotel in 
the Marais, 469 

Mazarin, Cardinal, 95, 141, 167, 
170; brings first opera to Paris, 
120, 345, 379. 385, 390, 506 

Melancthon, Philippe, 94 

Menage, Gilles, I'Abbe, his house 
in the cloisters, 76 

Merimee, Prosper, 281; his appear- 
ance, 289; his work and working- 
places, 290, 364; at Hugo's, 415 

Mestayer, Arnold, Captain of the 
Hundred Musketeers, 112 

Meung, the village of, 87 

Jean de, site of his dwelling, 

85 

Meurice, Paul, friend of Hugo, 429 

Michel, Charles, Abbe de I'Epee, 
teaches deaf-mutes, 210; his two 
statues, 210, 211 

Michelet, Jules, birthplace and 
homes, 284 et seq.; his lectures, 
286; his pen-work, 287, 365; his 
tomb, 288; quoted, 456, 459, 519 

Mdme., 287 



Mignard, Pierre, painter, 44, 45, 
172,208; his residence intact ,128; 
his portrait of Moliere, 128, 495 

Mignet, Franjois-Auguste-Marie, 
historian, 365 

Milton, John, at Marion Delorme's, 
411 

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 276 

Public Instruction, 276 

Mirabeau, Gabrielle - Honore - Ri- 
quetti, Comte de, 225, 237, 263, 
266 

Mohl, Mdme. Julius, her apart- 
ment in the Abbaye-aux-Bois, 
313; at Chateaubriand's sick-bed, 
318 

Moliere, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 
69, 140, 151, 152, 155, 172, 174, 
178, 183, 208, 264, 266; his birth- 
house, 105; his baptism in Saint- 
Eustache, 106; at college, 107 et 
seq.; his schooling for the stage, 
109 et seq.; sites of his theatres, 
no et seq.; his widow's theatre, 
and foundation of La Comedie 
Frangaise, 119 et seq.; his mar- 
riage in Saint-Germain-l'Auxer- 
rois, 124; his son's baptism in 
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, 126; 
his son's burial and daughter's 
baptism in Saint-Eustache, 126; 
his homes, 106, 112, 113, 118, 125 
et seq., 129 et seq.; his death and 
burial, 132, 134 et seq.; his arm- 
chair in the Theatre Frangais, 
133; his arm-chair at Pezenas, 
134; his appearance, 136; his 
Mascarille in the Marais, 475, 
477; at Marion Delorme's, 411; 
at Ninon's, 497; in the Hotel La- 
moignon, 532 

Monastery, Celestins, 440, 520, 527, 
541 



568 



INDEX 



Monastery des Hospitalieres-Saint- 

Gervais, 536 
Sainte-Catherine du Val- 

des-Ecoliers, 486 
Monge, Gaspard, savant, 253 
Montaigne, Michel-Eyquem de, 2, 

93; quoted, 458> 49^ 
Montmartre, 430, 437 
Montmorenci, haunted by Rousseau 

and Robespierre, 206, 237 
— Anne de, C o n s t a b 1 e of 

France, his hotel in the Marais, 

543 
Mont-Parnasse, 283 
Mont-de-Piete, tower of old wall in 

its court, 52 
Mont-Sainte-Genevieve, 28, 78, 89, 

349 
Monval, M., Librarian of the Thea- 
tre Frangais, 10 
Moreau, Hegesippe, poet, dies of 

starvation, 348 
Moriau, Antoine, leaves his library 

to Paris, 532 
Morley, John, quoted, 195, 203, 

208 
Miirger, Henri, his bust in the 

Luxembourg Gardens, 283 
Musee des Archives, 138 

du Cluny, 21, 35, 86, 97 

Dupuytren, 230 

du Louvre, 125, 184, 204, 

241 
des Monuments - Frangais, 

77> loi, i35» 190 
Musset, Louis-Charles-Alfred de, 
his birthplace, 254; his escapade 
with George Sand, 298; his soli- 
tary flight in life, 363; at Hugo's, 
414,415 

Necker, Jacques, 309, 408 
Louis, 31 



Necker, Mdme., 100 

Nodier, Charles, his grave, 357; li- 
brarian at the Arsenal, 364; at 
Hugo's, 415; honors Rabelais, 
461 ; his salon in the Arsenal, 521 ; 
quoted, 489 

Odeon, the theatre, 289, 299 
Orleans, Charles, Due de, 60 
Duchesse d', Charlotte Eli- 
sabeth de Baviere, wife of Phi- 
lippe, 166 

Louis de Valois, Due de, 56 

et seq.; 71; his statue at Pierre- 
fonds, 57; his assassination, 58 

Paine, Thomas, 209; member of 
the Convention, 250; carries key 
of the Bastille to Washington, 

501 
Palais, the old, 21, 23, 30, 38, 61, 

75, 439, 440, 450, 455, 5°^ 
Cardinal (later Royal), 118, 

411, 481 

de r Ely see, 262 

de Justice, 64, 66, 151, 155, 

182, 440, 464 
du Louvre, 4, 23, 30, 45, 54, 



88, 91, loi, 117, 125, 139, 169, 
181, 184, 205, 310, 346, 375, 376, 
389, 439, 450, 454, 460, 479, 487, 

505, 517, 527 
du Luxembourg, 22, 96, 



169, 227, 251, 262, 383, 389 
Royal, 119, 120, 124, 127, 



227, 265, 308, 362, 363, 411, 447, 
481 

de Saint- Cloud, 262 

des Thermes, 21 

des Tournelles, 4, 376, 453 



et seq., 461, 463, 470, 505 
des Tuileries, 482, 505 



INDEX 



569 



Palissy, Bernard, 14, 91 et seq.; his 

statue, 239 
Palloy, " the Patriot," demoHshes 

the Bastille, 500 
Pantaleon, quoted, 273 
Pantheon, the, 274, 431, 436 
Pare, Ambroise, surgeon, 39 
Parisii, the tribe of, 435, 436 
Pascal, Blaise, 167, 249; tablet on 

site of his dweUing, 96; place of 

his experiments, 97; his grave, 98 
Passage Charlemagne, 444 

des Feuillants, 234 

du Pont-Neuf, 120 

Sainte-Marie, 294 

Saint-Paul, 504 

Saint-Pierre, 502 

Saulmer, 242 

Passy, 9, 214, 215, 241; Jules Ja- 

nin dies at, 289; Lamartine lives 

at, 280; Balzac's residences in, 

339, 341, 343, 350; Beranger's 

cottage in, 341 
Patru, Olivier, befriended by Boi- 

leau, 179 
Pays Latin, le, 79, 80, 94, 150; the 

Latin Quarter, 273, 300 
P ellisson- Fontaine, Paul, his 

" Chronique du Samedi," 477 
Pere-Lachaise, the priest, 345; the 

cemetery (see Cemetery) 
Perrault, Claude, Dr., designed 

eastern facade of the Louvre, 181 
Petion, de Villeneuve, Jerome, 226 
Pharmacie-Centrale, the, 512 
Philippe- Auguste, 29, 35, 38; his 

wall, 2, 31 et seq., 51, 55, 79, 223, 

273, 376, 438, 440, 442, 445. 461, 

535, 536 

IV., " le Bel," 64, 449 

d' Orleans, 508 

Phlipon (see Roland) 
Picpus, 172, 422, 424 



Pierrefonds, 57 

Piron, Alexis, his epitaph on him- 
self, 201 

Pitt, William, his gibe at Mdme. de 
Stael, 303 

Place de la Bastille, 407, 443, 447, 

498, 504, 530 

Boieldieu, 367 

du Carrousel, 233, 346, 448 

du Chatelet, 31, 116 

de la Concorde, 233, 304, 

505 



de la Croix-Rouge, 153, 380 

Dauphine, 21, 243, 463 

de I'Ecole-de-Medecine, 230 

de France, 479 

de Greve (now de I'Hotel- 

de-Ville), 23, 48, 96, 232, 439, 517 

des Italiens, 367, 368 

de Louis XV. (now de la 



Concorde), 233 

Malesherbes, 373 

Maubert, 82, 94, 96, 194 

de la Nation, 205, 233, 241, 



424 



de rOdeon, 226, 299, 534 

de r Opera, 311 

du Palais-Royal, 124, 125 

du Parvis, 27 

du Petit-Pont, 83 

des Pyramides, 371 

de la Reunion (now du Car- 
rousel), 233 
de la Revolution (now de la 



Concorde), 229, 233, 237 
Roy ale (now des Vosges), 



63, 115, 376, 390, 410, 411, 417, 
464, 467, 475, 479, 480, 482, 485, 

492,518,533 

Saint-Andre-des-Arts, 158 

Saint-Michel, 297 

Saint-Sulpice, 292, 293, 380, 



403 



S70 



INDEX 



Place Scipion, 41, 42 

de la Sorbonne, 158 

du Theatre-Frangais, 226, 

447 

du Trone (now de la Na- 
tion), 205 

des Victoires, 143, 301, 361, 



447 



des Vosges, 107 



Planche, Gustave, playwright, 348 
Poictiers, Diane de, her dwellings in 

the Marais, 469, 540 
Poissy, Gerard de, 30 
Pompadour, La- Jeanne-Antoinette 

le Normand, her girlhood home, 

208 
Pont d'Arcole, 27 

des Arts, 54 

d'Austerlitz, 421 

au Change, 25, 31, 238, 243, 

248 



de la Concorde, 500 

au Double, 27 

Louis-Philippe, 47 

Marie, 46 

aux Meuniers, 25 

Neuf, 24, 2>i, 91, 107. 169, 

183, 463, 468 
Notre-Dame, 25, 96, 389, 



436 



Petit, 26, 27, 31, 82, 96, 389 

Rouge, 76 

Royal, 169, 214, 302, 315 

Saint-Louis, 76 

Saint-Michel, 389 

de la Tournelle, 46 

Pope, Alexander, quoted, 77 
Poquelin (see Moliere) 
Port de Grenelle, 438 

de Greve, 438 

Saint-Paul, 52, 115, 259,438, 

440, 540 
Porte Barbette, 537 



Porte Baudoyer (later Saint -An- 

toine), 52 
Bordee (later Saint-Marcel), 



de Buci, t^t,, 58, 223, 454 
Dauphine, 33 
de I'Etoile, 302 
Montmartre, 378 
de Nesle, 32 
Saint-Antoine, 52, 96, 378, 



441, 442, 443, 498, 505, 506, 507 

Saint-Bernard, 32 

Saint-Denis, 53, 301, 443, 



447, 448 

Saint-Germain, 2,3, 229 

Saint-Honore, 447, 448 

Saint- Jacques, 23, 33, 85 

Saint-Marcel, 41, 88, 96 

Saint-Martin, 53, 448 

Saint-Michel, ;^t,, 89 

Saint- Victor, 88 



Poterne Barbette, 52 

des Barres, 52 

Beaubourg, 53 

Poussin, Nicolas, teacher of Le- 
brun, 43 

Praslin, Charles - Laure - Hugues- 
Theobald, Due de Choiseul, as- 
sassin of his wife, 130 

Pre-aux-Clercs, 273, 527 

Prevost, the Abbe, his creation of 
Manon Lescaut, 292, 498; his 
abode in the Marais, 498 

Prison - 1' Abbaye - Saint - Germain- 
des-Pres, 218, 239, 247, 398 

Bastille, la, 23, 92, 96, 194, 

196, 214, 216, 218, 227, 232, 345, 
346, 378, 443, 444, 454, 479, 498, 
505,514,516,521 

Carmelites, les, 239, 251, 



381,382 
- — — ■ Conciergerie, la, 24, 42, 238, 



240, 241, 2Z 



INDEX 



571 



Prison, La Force, 31, 240 

Grand-Chatelet, le, 408, 514 

Grande-Force, la, 407, 530 

Luxembourg, 227, 239, 251, 



501 



397 



Maternite, la, 238 

Pignerol, 345 

de la Roquette, 378 

of Rue du Cherche-Midi, 

Saint-Lazare, 239, 241 
Sainte-Pelagie, 43, 240,244, 



247 et seq., 500 

Salpetriere, 238 

Temple, 450 

Vincennes, 205 



Puys, death of Dumas pere at, 373 

QuAi, d'Anjou, 46, 345 

des Augustins, 1 50 

de Bethune, 46 

de Bourbon, 46 

des Celestins, 52, 113, 4i5> 

438, 440, 442, 455> 461 518, 520, 

522, 523 

Conti, 249, 257 e/ seq., 260 

de r Ecole (later du Louvre), 



118, 124 

aux Fleurs, 75 

des Grands Augustins, 1 50, 



167,379 

Henri IV., 21, 443 

de I'Horloge, 243 

de 1' Hotel de ViUe, 48 

du Louvre, 118, 124 

des Lunettes, 243 

Malaquais, 153, 162, 169 et 



seq., 212, 232, 245, 297, 329, 332 

Montebello, 31 

des Orffevres, 182 

d'Orleans, 46 

d'Orsay, 279 

Saint-Michel, 31, 297, 298 



Quai des Theatins (later Mala- 
quais), 212 

de la Tournelle, 32, 54, 84 

Voltaire, 169, 212, 245, 267, 

348 

Quinet, Edgar, " part of the con- 
science of France," 283 et seq.; 
mentioned, 286, 289 

Rabelais, Francois, 14, 43, 82, 89, 
93, 94, 95, 113; his abode in the 
Marais, 461; his burial-place, 
462, 502; mentioned, 488 

Rachel (EUsa-Rachel-Felix, Mile.), 
her garret in the Marais, 517; her 
palatial apartment in the Marais, 
518 

Racine, Jean, 14, 19, 68, 98, 108, 
122, 129, 147, 149, 167 et seq., 
174, 178 et seq., 183, 185, 204; 
comes to Paris, 149; his homes, 
150. 153- 154, 157 etseq.; his rela- 
tions with La Fontaine, 150; with 
Moliere, Corneille, Boileau, 152, 
153, 165; his plays, 155 et seq.; 
his marriage, 157; his domestic 
life, 164 et seq.; his place of 
burial, 167; his bust by Girar- 
don, 184; referred to, 275, 288, 

329, 497, 532, 542 

Louis, 157, 160, 176, 180, 

187 
Rambouillet, " /a i^o/fe," 171 
Ravaillac, Francois, assassin of 

Henri IV., 4, 48, 107, 470 
Reade, Charles, quoted, 66 
Recamier, Madame, 2^75; her homes 
in Paris, 308 et seq.; her looks and 
character, 310; exiled, 311; her 
salon in the Abbaye-aux-Bois, 
312 et seq.; her influence on 
Chateaubriand, 314; her death, 
319 



572 



INDEX 



Regnard, Jean- Francois, 217; poet 
and playwright, 217, 428, 532 

Regnier, Mathurin, poet, 428 

Renaissance, the, 68 

Renan, Joseph-Ernest, student in 
Paris, 44; his influence, 291; his 
schooling, 292, 293; his career and 
homes, 293,- 294; his appearance, 
295; quoted, 296 

Retz, Jean-Franfois-Paul de Gon- 
di. Cardinal, 187 

Reuilly, 172 

Revolution of 1830, 274, 277 

of 1848, 276, 277 

Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, 
Cardinal, 5, 49, 84, 118, 127, 138, 
141, 146, 148, 345. 379» 382, 385, 
411, 471. 472, 473. 480, 497, 
533 

Marquis de, 345 

Robespierre, Maximilien, 206, 231, 
233. 241, 250, 252; at college in 
Paris, 226; his dwellings, 235; his 
appearance, 236 

Rohan, Armand-Gaston de, Bishop 
of Strasbourg, 549 

Cardinal de, of the Diamond 

Necklace, 549 

Franf ois de, Prince de Sou- 



bise, 548 

Rohan-Chabot, Chevalier de, has 
Voltaire thrashed, 196 

Rohault, Dr., Moliere's physician 
and friend, 131 

Roland, Mdme. (Marie- Jeanne 
Phlipon), birthplace, 243; her 
homes, 243 et seq.; her convent- 
school, 244; in the Abbaye prison, 
247; her authentic last words, 
248 

de la Platriere, Minister of 



Rollin, Charles, historian, his cot- 
tage, 98, 99 

Ronsard, Pierre de, 44, 241; his 
residence, 88 et seq. 

Roqueplan, Nestor, quoted, 14 

Rouen, 23, 34, 68, no, 138, 161 

Rouget de Lisle, Claude- Joseph, 
242 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 195, 201 
203, 205, 214, 243, 249; his home 
in Paris, 206; his statue, 206, 348 

Route d' Orleans (now Rue Saint- 
Jacques), 31 

Rue de I'Abbaye, 239 

de I'Abbe de I'Epee, 211, 

293 



de I'Abbe-Gregoire, 405 

d'Aboukir, 261, 309, 447 

Amelot, 218 

d'Amsterdam, 373 

de I'Ancienne Comedie, 121, 

162, 201, 228, 231, 264 

des Anglais, 253 

Antoine-Dubois, 229 

de TArbalete, 286 

aux Arbaletriers, 536 

de I'Arbre-Sec, 519 

des Archives, 450, 545, 548 

d'Argenteuil, 142, 143 

d' Arras, 35 

d'Assas, 254, 287, 288, 381, 



382 



the Interior, 244, 246; his suicide, 
248 



d'Athenes, 430 

d'Auteuil, 129 

de I'Ave Maria, 52, 114, 524 

de Babylone, 315, 426, 427 

du Bac, 9, 169, 213, 254, 

275» 290, 305, 315, 367, 426 

Balzac, 354 

Barbette, 485, 541 

des Barres, 113 

de la Barriere-des-Gobelins 



(now Fagon), 421 



INDEX 



573 



Rue Basse (now Raynouard), 215, 

341 

Basse-du-Rempart, 311 

de la Bastille, 378 

des Batailles, 339 

de Beam, 473 (Impasse de, 

493) 

Beaubourg, 53 

de Beauce, 475 

de Beaune, 212, 214, 300 

de Beauregard, 240 

Beautreillis, 452, 502, 517 

de Beaux- Arts, 290, 400 

de Bellechasse, 274, 276, 

534 

Berger, 50 

Bernard-Palissy, 91 

Berton, 342 

de Bethisy, 380 

de Birague, 462, 473, 485 

des Blanco-Manteaux, 541 

Bleue, 371 

Boileau, 186 

Bonaparte, 91, 135, 160, 

162, 173, 184, 190, 204, 290, 399, 

400, 401 

des Bons-Enfants, 127 

des Boucheries, 401 

des Boul angers, 89 

du Bouloi, 361, 367 

des Bourdonnais, 380 

de Bourgogne, 163, 275 

Boutebrie, 81 

de la Boucherie, 80, 194 

de Braque, 53, 545 

de Buci, 116, 184, 379 

Buffon, 285 

Cambaceres, 279 

des Capucines, 276 

du Cardinal Lemoine, 32, 



35-43,89 

Casette, 291, 381, 382, 386 

— Cassini, 331, 332, 338 



Rue de Castiglione, 91, 234, 347 

Caumartin, 311 

de la Cerisaie, 182, 249 

de la Chaise, 275 

du Champ -de - I'Alouette, 

426 

Champollion, 158, 288 

Chanoimesse, 16, 76, 154 

Chanteraine, 249, 261, 266 

des Chantres, 15, 76 

de la Chanverie, 427 

Charlemagne, 446, 513 

Charles V., 452, 502, 513 

Chariot, 480 

du Chaume, 545, 548 

de la Chaussee-d'Antin, 226, 

266, 309, 311, 361, 372 

du Chemin du Rempart, 238 

du Cherche-Midi, 381, 397, 



405 



Christine, 754 

du Cimitiere du Saint- 

Benoit, 86 

de la Cite, 243 

Claude-Bernard, 286 

de Clery, 139, 142, 143, 240 

de Clichy, 395, 43° 

du Cloitre-Notre-Dame, 15, 



76, 188 

du Clos Georgeau, 199 

Clotilde, 79 

Clovis, 35, 79 

du Colombier (now Jacob), 



162, 288 

de Conde, 90, 108, 217, 226 

Coquilliere, 53 

— ■ — des Cordeliers, 223, 224 

des Cordiers, 348 

^ Cours la Reine, 177, 233, 



429 



Crebillon, 226 

Croix- des - Petits - Champs, 



23: 



574 



INDEX 



Rue Culture - Sainte - Catherine 

(now Sevigne), 486 

Cuvier, 225 

Dalayrac, 246 

du Dauphin, 256 

Dauphine, 33, 122, 184 

Daval, 218 

— ■ Denfert-Rochereau,3o6,332 

Descartes, 35, 88 

des Deux-EgHses (now de 

I'Abbe de I'Epee), 293 
des Douze- Fortes (now 



Ville-Hardouin), 391, 490, 492 

du Doyenne, 346 

Dragon, Cour du, 91, 93, 



398, 403 

Drouot, 196 

de I'Ecole de Medecine, 33, 



223, 224, 227, 246 

des Ecoles, 83, 158, 246 

Eginhard, 504 

— — Elzevir, 541 

d'Enfer, 306, 315 

de I'Eperon, 158 

Ernest-Renan, 293 

Etienne Marcel, 50, 69, 72, 



384 



de I'Eveque, 143 

Fagon, 421 

du Faubourg Saint-Denis, 

239, 367 
du Faubourg Saint-Honore, 



260, 354 
du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 



2,i^^ 332 

du Fauconnier, 524, 529 

du Fer-a-Moulin, 41 

Feron, 383 

de la Ferronerie, 4, 48, 106, 



217,505 

aux Fers, 50 

des FeuUantines, 396 (Im- 
passe, 395) 



Rue du Figuier, 524 

des Filles-du-Calvaire, 418 

de Fleurus, 288 

Fortunee, 353 

des Fosse- de- Nesle , 112, 



116 



32 



des Fosses- Saint-Bernard, 



des Fosses- Saint- Germain, 



286 



des Fosses-Saint- Jacques, 

des Fosses-Saint- Victor, 89, 

des Fossoyeurs(now Servan- 

doni), 387 

du Fouarre, 82 

du Four Saint-Honore, 260 

Frangaise, 69 

Frangois-Miron, 96, 505, 



507 
des Francs-Bourgeois, 52, 

53, 485, 486, 530, 531, 533, 535, 

536,537,547,548 

Franklin, 215 

de la Gaite, 425 

Galande, 80, 194 

Gambetta, 339 

Gay-Lussac, 299 

■ Geoffroy-Lasnier, 510 

Git-le-Coeur. 150 

des Gobelins, 28 

Gozlin, 239, 399 

de la Grande-Truanderie, 



427 
des Grands-Augustins, 254, 

288,379 

de la Grange-Bateliere, 379 

— — ■ Gregoire-de-Tours, 116 
de Crenelle, 53, 153, 163, 



177, 184, 276 

Greneta, 65 

Guemenee (Impasse de), 41 2 



INDEX 



575 



Rue Guenegaud, 34, 120, 187, 245, 

390 

de Harlay, 464 

de Harlay-au-Palais, 21 

de la Harpe, 96, 150, 246 et 

seq., 389 

Hautefeuille, 81 

Herold, 97, 367 

des Hospitalieres-Saint-Ger- 



vais, 536 

de I'Hotel-Colbert, 80 

de I'Hotel de Ville, 524 

des Innocents, 49 

del'Isly,4i8 

Jacob, 91, 162, 288, 290 

Jacques-Coeur, 499 

des Jardins-Saint-Paul, 52, 

89, 113,452,461 

Jean-Goujon, 409 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 53, 



172, 206, 264 

du Jerusalem, 181, 193 

Joubert, 373 

-dejouy, 511 

Lafayette, 371 

Lamartine (square), 280 

de la Lanterne, 243 

de Lesdiguieres, 187, 325, 



518-520 

Lhomond, 286 

de Lille, 290, 302 

■ de la Lingerie, 49 

des Lions-Saint-Paul, 182, 



215, 247, 253 

des Lombards, 388, 505 

Louis-le-Grand, 254 

Louvois (square), 402 

du Louvre, 118, 126, 367 

des Magons (now Cham- 



poUion), 158, 165, 288 

Madame, 294, 367 

du Mail, 261, 301, 308, 309 

Malher, 408, 505, 530 



Rue des Marais - Saint - Germain 
(now Visconti), 90, 160, 187, 328 

Marsollier, 246 

des Martyrs, 356 

Masillon, 75 

Mauconseil, 51, 64, 69, 264 

Mazarine, 32, iii et seq. 

119, 120, 122, 254 

de Meziferes, 401, 402 

Moliere, 128, 200 

Mondetour, 429 

t Monge, 43> 44, 89, 96, 98, 



244, 436 
Monsieur-le-Prince, 32, 7,3^ 

89, 108, 229, 289, 389 
de la Montagne - Sainte- 



Genevieve, 82 
du Mont-Blanc, 225, 309, 



361 

Montmartre, 53, 13 5, 437 

Montorgeuil, 51, 53 

du Mont-Parnasse, 229, 

282, 289 

Montpensier, 127, 128 

des Moulins, 210 

de Navarre, 98, 244, 436 

de Nazareth, 193 

Neuf-Saint-Etienne, 98, 244 

Neuve - Saint - Paul (now 

Charles V.), 513 
Neuve - Sainte - Catherine 



(now Francs-Bourgeois), 486, 

546 
Neuve - Sainte - Genevieve 



(now Tournefort), 349 

des Nonnains-d'Hybres, 512 

Notre - Dame- des- Champs, 



281, 332, 405 ^t- ^^3-» 414, 425* 

427,431 

des Noyers, 253 

des Oiseaux, 476 

de rOrangerie, 238 

d' Orleans, 126 



576 



INDEX 



Rue Oudinot, 426 

de I'Ouest (now d'Assas), 

287, 288 

Palatine, 387 

de Paradis, 547 

de la Parcheminerie, 80, 83, 



142, 143 

du Parc-Royal, 490, 538 

Paul-Louis-Courier, 294 

Pavee-aux-Marais, 529, 530 

de Penthievre, 215, 279 

Percee (now Prevot), 445 

du Perche, 536 

de la Perle, 538 

Perrault, 519 

Perree, 450 

— — du Petit-Musc, 468, 469, 



518, 522 
de la Petite - Truanderie, 



427, 429 
des Petits-Augustins (now 



Bonaparte), 290, 399, 400 

des Petits-Champs, 140, 246 

de Picpus, 422 

de la Planche, 275 

Platriere, 53, 115, 172, 206 

- — — Plumet (now Oudinot), 427 
- — ■ — de Poissy, 45, 421 

du Pont-Neuf, 106 

de Pontoise, 44, 421 

des Postes (now Lhomond), 



Poultier, 46, 54 

— — Prevot, 445 

des Quatre-Fils, 548 

Racine, 230, 246, 299 

Rambuteau, 53, 106, 427, 

428, 543, 544 

Rameau, 402 

Raynouard, 215, 341 

de la Reale, 106 

du Regard, 381, 397 

Regrettier, 46 



Rue Remusat, 130 

du Renard, 68 

de Rennes, 204, 382, 399, 

405 

de la Reynie, 217 

de Richelieu, 125, 126, 128, 

132, 205, 208, 265, 301, 341, 372 
de Rivoli, 52, 234, 256, 267, 



371, 381, 504, 505 

de la Rochefoucauld, 430 

de Rohan, 505 

du Roi-de-Sicile, 408, 505, 



529 



Rollin, 96, 98 

de la Roquette, 218, 378 

Rotron, 289 

Royale, 238, 304 

Saint- Andre - des - Arts, 2)Z'> 

34, 158, 223 
Saint-Antoine, 52, 63, 96, 



196, 218, 377, 378, 412, 418, 437, 
440, 442, 444, 446, 453, 454, 455, 
459, 461, 462, 464, 465, 468, 473, 
498, 499, 501, 504, 505, 506, 507, 
529, 546 

Saint-Avoie, 543 

Saint-Benoit, 204 

Saint-Denis, 6, 49, 50, 51, 



53, 61, 65, 217, 284, 384, 437, 438, 
505, 506 
Saint-Dominique, 274, 275, 



306, 380, 385, 402 

Saint-Fiacre, 500. 

Saint-Florentin, 238 

Saint-Gervais-des-Coutures, 



145 

Saint-Gilles, 455 

Saint-Guillaume, 294 

Saint-Honore, 48, 54, 91, 

105, 119, 125, 126, 172, 183, 210, 
234, 235, 237, 238, 252, 256. 264, 

347, 505 
Saint-Hyacinthe 144 



INDEX 



577 



Rue Saint-Jacques, 22, 31, 34, 84 
et seq., loS, 193, 211, 379, 389, 

396, 399 

Saint- Joseph, 135 

Saint-Lazare, 371 

Saint-Louis (now Turenne), 

324, 391. 490 

Saint-Louis-en-l'ile, 199 

Saint-Martin, 53, 384, 437 

Saint-Paul, 504, 513, 523 

Saint-Placide, 405 

Saint-Roch, 256 e/ seq., 371 

Saint - Thomas- du -Louvre, 



124, 126 

Saint- Victor, 44, 88, 93 

Sainte-Anne, 140, 143 

Sainte-Catherine (now Se- 



vigne), 377, 547 
Sainte - Marguerite (now 



Gozlin), 239, 398, 399 

des Saints-Peres, 274 

Saintonge, 235 

Sauval, 105 

de Seine, 90, 112, 120, 160, 



169, 255, 267, 329, 331, 400 

Servandoni, 249, 251, 387 

Sevigne, 377, 442, 486, 490, 



533, 539, 547 

de Sevres, 312, 314 

Singer, 215 

Soufflot, 33, 89 

de la Sourdiere, 172 

Square du, 318, 450 

de SuUie, 520 

Taitbout, 299 

Taranne, 204, 207 

du Temple, 53, 449, 45°, 



543, 544, 550 

Theophile Gautier, 129, 130 

Therese, 211 

de Thorigny, 145, 324, 412, 



485 



Rue Tiquetonne, 388 

Tonnellerie, 106 

de la Tour-d'Auvergne, 308, 

418, 419 

de la Tour-des-Dames, 267 

Tournefort, 349 

des Tournelles, 218, 391, 

485, 493, 494, 498 
de Tournon, 90, 254, 294, 

330, 33"^, 534 

de Tracy, 284 

Traversiere - Saint -Honore, 

128, 199 

des Trois-Pavilions (now 



Elzevir), 541 

Turenne, 391, 455, 490 

d'Ulm, 396 

de rUniversite, 279, 305, 



367,371 

des Ursius, 76, 154 

de Valois, 119, 127 

Vaneau, 294 

de Vanves, 407 

de Varennes, 275 

de Vaugirard, 108, 251, 254, 



289, 292, 381, 382, 386, 387, 405, 

425 

Vauvilliers, 260 

de Verneuil, 275 

de la Verrerie, 68, 449, 505 

de la Victoire, 261, 361 

Vieille-du-Temple, 53, 68, 



145, 217, 412, 449, 537, 538, 541, 

548, 549, 55° _ 

Vieilles-Etuves, 105 

des Vieux-Augustins (now 



Herold), 367 
du Vieux - Colombier, 153, 



183, 185,379,380,384,390 

Ville-Hardouin, 490, 492 

Visconti, 90, 91, 160, 163, 



Thouin, 32 



165, 176, 195, 200, 328, 329, 400 
des Vosges, 412, 473, 533 



578 



INDEX 



Rungis, Roman aqueduct from, 

22 

Ruskin, quoted, 15 

Sabli^re, Mdme. de la, 171, 173, 

176 
Saint-Crespin, 25 

Crespinien, 25 

Evremond, Charles de Mar- 

guetel de Saint-Denis, 174 

Germain, Dumas at, 373 

Gratien, Dumas at, 374 

Just, quoted, 414 

Louis (see Louis IX.) 

Pierre, Henri-Bernardin de, 



209, 292, 301; his house and gar- 
den, 99, 100 

Vincent-de-Paul, 63, 71 



Sainte-Beuve, Charles- Augustin, 90, 
228, 248, 249; his method of 
criticism, 280; his manner of 
work, 281; his residences, 281 et 
seq., 406; his bust in the Luxem- 
bourg Gardens, 283; mentioned, 
288, 298, 365, 406, 416; quoted, 

277, 303.353 
Croix, Gaudin de, lover of 

Marquise de Brinvilliers, 514 c^ 

seq. 
Salle des Gardes (Old Palace), 24 

des Gardes (Louvre), 117 

des Machines (Tuileries), 



264 



des Pas-Perdus, 23 



Sand, George (Amantine-Lucile- 
Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dude- 
vant), her growth, 296; comes to 
Paris, 297; homes there, 297 et 
seq.; her devotion to her children, 
298; referred to, 278, 332, 7,2,^, 

344,371 
Sandeau, Jules, collaborates with 
George Sand, 297; separates from 



her, 332; his friendship with Bal- 
zac, 332,338 

Sardini, Scipio, his villa, 41, 42 

Sardou, Victorien, 10, 26, 143, 224, 
228, 235 

Sauval, Henri, quoted, 42, 451, 455 
548, 549 

Saxe, Maurice de, his dwellings in 
Paris, 162, 297, 298 

Scarron, Paul, his " Roman Co- 
mique," 109; his homes in the 
Marais, 390, 391, 490, 492; his 
malady, his courage, his wit, 491; 
referred to, 497, 535 

Madame (see Madame de 

Maintenon) 

Scholars' Quarter, the, 273 

Scribe, Eugene, birthplace, 217; 
burial-place, 218, 325, 365 

Scudery, Georges de, 148, 411, 476, 

545 

Madeleine de, her home in 

the Marais, 475; her salon and its 
frequenters, 476, 477, 492, 545 

Seine, the river, 6, 21, 25, 26, 28, 
40, 54, 89, 100, 122, 130, 142, 172, 
183, 189, 214, 243, 254, 259, 273, 
27s. 297, 299, 342, 371, 395, 421, 
435, 438, 439, 442, 446, 540 

Sellier, Charles, of the Musee Car- 
navalet, 10 

Seminary, Mission Etrangeres, 315, 
316 

Picpus, 424 

Saint- Nicolas-du-Chardon- 

net, 292 

Saint-Sulpice, 292, 293 

Vendome, 324 



Semmaire, Saint-Nicolas-du-Char- 
donnet, 44, 45 

Sevigne, Marie deRabutin-Chantal, 
Marquise de, 2, 157, 161, 186, 
187; birthplace and girlhood- 



INDEX 



579 



house in the Marais, 485; her 
residence in Hotel Carnavalet, 
487-489; her salon, 489, 495; her 
loyalty to Fouquet, 488; her let- 
ters, 489; referred to, 491, 516, 
520, 522 

Sigier of Brabant, Dante's lecturer, 
83 

Simon, Jules, 294 

Sorbon, Robert de. Confessor of 
Saint-Louis, 84 

Sorbonne, La, 84, 86, 93, 183, 205, 
275,285,324,348,365 

" Sots, les," troupe of players, 64 

Soubise (see Rohan) 

SoufHot, Jacques-Germain, archi- 
tect, T,T, 

Soulie, Frederick, poet and play- 
wright, 363 

Square des Innocents, 50, 173 

Monge, 87, 88, 196 

Stael, Mdme. de (Anne-Louise- 
Germaine Necker, Baroness de 
Stael-Holstein), 157, 249, 303, 
310,311,314 

Steinkerk, battle of, 14 

Sue, Eugene, " Mysteres de Paris," 
20, 182; naval surgeon, 365 

Sully, Maximilien de Bethune, Due 

de, 46, 158, 196; his character, 

464; his hotel in the Marais, 195; 

mentioned, 326, 470, 479 

Surville, Laure de, Balzac's sister, 

327, 356 
Swinburne, Algernon, quoted on 
Hugo, 416 

T AINE , HiPPOLYTE -AdOLPHE, 

quoted, 175, 287, 291, 292 
Talma, Joseph-Franjois, his inti- 
macy with Bonaparte, 263; prac- 
tises dentistry in London, 264; 
his homes in Paris, 266 e^ seq.; 



his connection with the Comedie 
Franjaise, 242, 264, 265; sees 
Voltaire and Dumas, 264, 268; hi? 
last days, 365, 366 

Tasso, Torquato, in Paris, 88 

Taylor, Mile. Blanche, 9 

Temple, the, its rise and its ruin, 
449 

Tennyson, Alfred, quoted, 183 

Terrain, le, of Notre - Dame, 76, 
189 

Terror, the, 37; three famous vic- 
tims of, 240-252 

the White, 37 

Thackeray, W. M., in Paris, 400, 
401; quoted, 275, 296 

Theatre de la Comedie Franyaise, 
121, 141, 162, 196, 200, 205, 263 
et seq., 269 

de la Comedie Italienne, 68 

(see Theatre de 1' Hotel de Bour- 
gogne) 

de I'Egalite, 265 (see Co- 
medie Franf aise) 

Guenegaud, 119, 120, 162 

de r Hotel de Bourgogne, 

65, 68, 107, 120, 144, 146, 156, 
161, 264 

of His Majesty's Comedi- 
ans, 129 

Vlllustre, no et seq. 

■■ — Jeu de Paume de la Bou- 

teille, 119, 120 (see Theatre Gue- 
negaud) 

Jeu de Paume de la Croix- 



Blanche, 116 (see I'lllustre Thea- 
tre) 

Jeu de Paume de la Croix- 

Noire, 113 (see I'lllustre Theatre) 
Jeu de Paume de I'Etoile, 



121 (see Comedie Franjaise) 

du Marais, 68, 107, 139, 144 

et seq., 150, 161, 164 



58o 



INDEX 



Theatre Nationale, 265 (see Come- 
die Frangaise) 

de rOdeon (Second Thea- 
tre- Franjais), 108, 213, 216, 242, 
265 

du Palais-Royal, 151 

du Petit Bourbon, 117, 118, 



151 



de la Republique, 266 (see 

Comedie Franjaise) 
Salle des Gardes du Louvre, 



117 



Salle des Machines des 

Tuileries, 213, 264, 265 (see la 
Comedie Franjaise) 

Salle des Spectacles du 



Palais - Cardinal, 118, 119 (see 
Theatre du Palais-Royal) 
Trinity Hospital, 65 



Thierry, Amedee, historian, men- 
tioned, 289, 365 

Augustin, historian, men- 
tioned, 287, 289, 365 

Thiers, Adolpbe, mentioned, 276, 

364 
Third Republic, 7, 262, 288, 429, 

482 
Thoreau, quoted, 13 
Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-ilenri 

Clerel, Comte de, his homes in 

Paris, 274, 275; his visit to the 

United States, 274 
Touche, Henri de la, friend and 

enemy of Balzac, 330 
Tour Barbeau, 52, 54, 113, 443 

de Bois, 348 

de Dagobert, 17, 27 et seq. 

de I'Horloge, 24 

de " Jean-sans-Peur," 69 



et seq. 



Loriaux, 54 

de Nesle, 32, 54, 448 

" qui-fait-le-Coin," 54 



Tour Saint - Jacques - de - la - Bou- 

cherie, 97 
Saint- Jacques-du-Haut- Pas, 

97 
Tourgueneff, Ivan, at Daudet's, 

533 
Tournelles, the, 4 
Tristan I'Hermite, 35 
Tuileries, the, 224, 234, 236, 256, 

260, 262, 264 (see Palais) 
Turgot, 249 
Turlupin, the comic actor, 146 

Universite, P, 36, 54, 79, 83, 255, 

273, 283, 288 
Urban IV., pope, 273 

Val-de-Grace, 421 

Vaucel, Pierre de, the canon, 86 

Verlaine, Paul, his bust in the Lux- 
embourg Gardens, 283 

Vernet, Mdme., harbors Condorcet, 
250 et seq. 

Versailles, 43, 123, 145, 155, 159, 
165, 178, 216, 234, 284, 339, 494, 

499 

Vigny, Alfred de, an early Roman- 
ticist, 363; a scene from his 
" Cinq-Mars," 411, 412; visits 
Hugo, 404, 414 

Ville,la,s6, 54, 79,83, 255 

Ville d'Avray, residence of Balzac 
and of Gambetta, 339-341 

Villemain, Abel-Franjois, historian, 
281, 324, 365 

Villeneuve, Guillaume de, irascible 
citizen, 40 

Villeparisis, home of Balzac's fath- 
er, 328 

Villers-Cotterets, birth- and burial- 
place of Dumas pdre, 361, 362, 
373 



INDEX 



581 



Villon, Francois, 20, 64; his life, 86; 

his poetry, 87; his statue, 87 
■ Guillaume de. Canon of 

Saint-Benoit, 86 
Vincent-de-Paul, priest, 501, 527 
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene-Emmanuel, 

24; his reconstruction of Pierre- 

fonds, 57 
Visconti, Ennius-Quirinus (the 

elder), his residence still intact, 

169 
• Louis-Tullius- Joachim (the 

younger), designed Moliere 

Fountain, 128 
Valentine, Duchesse d' Or- 



leans, 57, 59 
Voie du Midi (now Rue Saint- 
Jacques), 31 



Voltaire, Fran^ois-Marie-Arcuet, 1 4, 
36, 47, iS9» 163, 164, 183, 1S6, 
208, 216, 264, 268; his baptism, 
158, 193; in the Bastille, 194; 
takes name of Voltaire, 195; trav- 
els, 195, 197, 200; thrashed, 196; 
his statues in Paris, 197, 212; 
his homes in Paris, 198, 199, 212; 
his death and secret burial, 213 
et seq.; his body removed to Pan- 
theon, 214; referred to, 283, 348, 
493, 497; quoted, 296, 428, 463, 
467, 503 

Washington, George, receives 
Chateaubriand, 301; key of the 
Bastille sent to him, 501 

Werdet, Balzac's publisher, 331 



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